CDO Announces Change To Cleaning Standards Red Tape

CDO Announces Change To Cleaning Standards Red Tape

Sara Hurley, the English Chief Dental Officer (CDO) sends out periodic updates entitled ‘Your NHS Dentistry and Oral Health Bulletin.’ GDP’s familiar with their style and usual content could be forgiven for not always reading them in their entirety. However there appears to be something quite important buried in the latest tract.

A first paragraph reminds readers that infection prevention and control (IPC), remains a priority ‘for all of us’ and exhorts readers to regular reviews of their IPC risk assessments. It also signposts that assistance is available from regional IPC leads and dental public health teams.

The second paragraph helpfully states that there, “is a wealth of online IPC guidance from the various professional bodies” although it points out that the National Infection Prevention and Control Manual, (NIPCM) remains the “key reference.”

And then almost as an afterthought the CDO comes to the National Standards of Healthcare Cleanliness 2021. At this point practice owners, practice managers and infection control leads may wish to sit down and take a deep breath before continuing. To quote directly, “Whilst the cleaning standards are common to all NHS healthcare settings, NHSE have confirmed that the specified recording requirements for ‘technical’ cleanliness and the efficacy of the cleaning process are currently only applicable in healthcare environments providing services under the NHS Standard Contract i.e. for all contracts for healthcare services other than primary care. We can confirm the GDS and PDS contract-holding dental practices will not be required to complete the various templates outlined in the document.”

The CDO does go on to add that the document “sets a benchmark for quality to which all should aspire”.  Those who have spent many hours preparing audits, setting up templates, training their teams and trying to meet the National Standards may feel a little bitter about the very late timing of this clarification. The various support organisations who have tried to provide ‘simple’ means of compliance may also be feeling a little unhappy. The biggest losers as so often, will be patients, as the teams that should be looking after them are diverted into what was generally perceived as a superfluous box ticking exercise.

Also in the latest update the CDO writes about, ‘reducing violence against staff assets’, and ‘The NHS clinical entrepreneur programme’. It would appear that the period of operational silence regarding the NHS access crisis, workforce shortage, and contract reform, continues.

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Raj Kumar
CDO cleaning
As far as I can read in the IFC manual 2022 the cleaning templates and audits relate to hospitals and not primary dental care
And as such CDO only mentions these templates of cleanliness should not be used in dental practices
Which does not preclude using cleaning records and templates as per Htm01/05
So unless I’m wrong nothing has changed

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