Medical Emergencies in Dental Offices

Today we will talk about those situation from which we afraid the most and our work is going on only by God.

Yes, you understand right, medical emergencies in dental office. Medical emergencies are more common than we think because most of the patients don’t know that exactly what problem they have.

Second reason is we also don’t take precautionary measures like patch test.

I had seen many medical emergencies in the practice of my G-10 years and the truth is the god did it right, I had no role in it.

But the most dangerous incident occurred when seizure came to the patient in dental chair. Luckily the parents of the patient knew what had to be done. I felt helpless a lot at that time and decided to learn and equip myself with it.

DC and NABH both ants that we do not only refer medical practices but also manage them too. If you live in an urban area then ambulance may take 30 minutes to come and if you live in a rural area then ambulance could take approx an hour to come.

So, we have to do the care of patients till then.

Medical emergency in dental clinic is a lengthy topic so I have divided it in parts. You can learn about the following things from these series.

1. How should be you and your team?

2. What should be there in emergency kit?

3. How to do basic life support activity like CPR?

4. Learning ABCDE of primary survey.

5. Learning about common individual emergency condition like asthma, angina attack.

6. Learn to use equipment like oxygen cylinder etc.

Now we will see some general principles so that you can prepare your team.

GENERAL PRINCIPLES

Focus should be on prevention and preparedner.

• Take and review medical condition prior to each procedure.

• Periodic drills with staffs are essential.

The most important thing is to prevent the emergencies and second important thing is if emergency occurs then be prepared for that.

That’s why medical history is very important before any work. We generally take medical history only in procedure involving surgery.

But doing this can be expensive to you. E.g. scaling is a very small work but you can’t do this to the patient with electric pacemaker.

The medical emergency, seizure, which I had talked about, if I would have taken medical history of the patient then I should have known about it and I would have refer  that patient to the hospital.

Second is to do mock drill –

You will do the course of BLS in normal circumstances and then forget it. So it’s necessary to do mock drill time to time.