Having the right tools for your veterinary dental cases is essential for ensuring efficient and profitable dental procedures.
I remember when dental procedures were few and far between, perhaps treating only one or two cases a month. But times have changed! Now, General Practitioners can see three or more dental cases each day.
Review Your Instruments
Having the right tools for any job is paramount to its execution. Have you ever tried undoing a screw with a knife tip because you couldn’t find the screwdriver? Well, the same goes for dentistry. If you don’t have the right instruments, the procedure will become more challenging, and you will lose time.
Tip 1: Consider Your Patients
Your review starts with considering the patients you commonly treat.
Are you a feline-only clinic? Do you treat rabbits along with cats and dogs?
Do you see a spread of small patients (<10kgs) and large patients?
Now look at your instruments—do you have the range of instruments needed to treat the species that you see (yes, they differ between species!)?
Do you have instruments of all sizes to suit your patients? A good example of this is Periosteal Elevators, as there is a fine size that suits cats and small dogs, whereas the standard size is better suited to medium-large breed dogs.
Tip 2: Streamline your Instruments into Species-Specific Kits
As in theatre, surgical kits are created to suit the common procedures, from Spey Kits to your Orthopaedic Kits. Have your nursing team review your instruments and sort them into various kits.
Here are some examples to get you started:
- Periodontal Kit: Include a dental mirror, periodontal probe/explorer, hand curettes and scalers
- Deciduous Tooth Extraction Kit: Include Deciduous Elevators, Molt-9 Periosteal Elevator and right-angled extraction forceps
- Feline/Small Extraction Kit: Include 1mm and 2mm Straight Elevators, scalpel handle, fine periosteal elevator, Le Grange Scissors and extraction forceps
- Canine/Med-Lge Extraction Kit: Include 2mm-6mm Winged Elevators, scalpel handle, periosteal elevator, Le Grange Scissors and extraction forceps
- Dental Suture Kit: Include Needle Holders, Adson Brown forceps, suture scissors
Setting up these dental-specific kits will not only improve your efficiency throughout the procedure—no more deep diving into a container filled with a mix of instruments—but will also help to improve the set-up time and the time spent reprocessing these instruments.
Tip 3: Reprocessing of Instruments
Following the previous tip, organising instruments into kits will also reduce the time spent cleaning and sterilising instruments as unused instruments will not require cleaning.
Although the number of dental cases treated each day has increased in many practices, often, the number of instruments required to treat those patients has not.
As your dentist does, every patient should be treated with a clean, sterilised set of instruments. This means that either time needs to be allowed for reprocessing the dental kits between patients, the species treated needs to be alternated to allow for the reprocessing of instruments between patients of the same species, or the number of kits we have available to treat our patients needs to be increased.
Tip 4: Wear & Tear, Maintenance and Replacement
Dental Instruments are the workhorses in your practice.
Not only are they used multiple times a day, but they are asked to perform some tough extractions!
At the end of every procedure, the instruments should be checked for any signs of wear & tear or damage and replaced. Those instruments requiring sharpening (eg. luxators, elevators, scalers and curettes) should be sharpened correctly, cleaned and sterilised ready for use with the next patient.
Is it time to upgrade or increase the number of your veterinary dental tools?
Check out iM3’s range of Ergo dental instruments featuring an innovative handle design that provides comfort and soft silicon inserts that provide added grip during use.
iM3 Ergo Winged Elevators and Luxators have handles in two lengths to provide comfort and control for even the smallest hands. Correctly fitting hand instruments saves time, improves cutting ability, increases tactile sensitivity, and improves overall technique and safety.
If you have any questions about new veterinary dental tools, setting up your dental kits, or caring for and maintaining your existing dental instruments, ask them in the Comments section below.
