Proposal for Tier-Based Resumption of Dental Practice Determined by COVID-19 Rate, Testing and COVID-19 Vaccination: A Narrative Perspective

The Impact of COVID-19 on Parental Perception of Oral Health-Related Quality of Life of Children: A Comparison of a Sample from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait

Materials and Methods

OHRQoL was measured using a a validated Arabic version of the Child Oral Health Impact Profile (COHIP). Parents of children aged between 5 and 9 years were administered questionnaire during the COVID-19 pandemic. The responses were compared across the different domains of the questionnaire between the two countries using the Mann-Whitney U test. Differences were also tested between the parents of males and females separately in each city. The correlation of the COHIP scores with the age of the child was done using the Spearman's rho.

Results

No significant differences in overall COHIP scores were found between the parents in Riyadh and Kuwait City (p > 0.05). There were significant gender differences observed across domains in Kuwait (p = 0.030) but not in Riyadh (p = 0.295). There was also a significant negative correlation between the different COHIP domains in Kuwait but not Riyadh.

Conclusion

There is a greater gender difference and age correlation of OHRQoL among the population studied in Kuwait City when compared to those in Riyadh.

A COVID-19 University-Based Dental Clinic Experience and Infection Control Protocol Modification for Safe Clinical Education

OBJECTIVES

 The aim of the study was to share our experience of the development and application of a modified infection control protocol at the Dental Teaching Hospital, Umm Al-Qura University (UQUDENT) during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. A second aim was to evaluate the impact of the implemented strategies on preparations for future requirements in clinical dental education.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

 In this descriptive study, we evaluated the challenges facing dental practice and categorized them into four domains: challenges facing dental practice during the pandemic, the risk of acquiring COVID-19 infection, the design of student clinics, and the financial challenges. The impact of strategies established to deal with such challenges was studied by comparing the number of treated patients from September 1, 2020, to March 01, 2021, with the number treated during the same months pre-COVID-19. The COVID-19 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) confirmed students and health care workers (HCWs) were expressed in numbers and percentages in each category of the study group.

RESULTS

 Policies were set up to deal with the challenges in each domain, after training all the hospital personnel in mitigation of the spread of infection within the hospital. We left a non-working clinic between every two operating clinics, and the patient risk was assessed by triage scoring and health status checks by a Saudi mobile application at the entrance. The hospital delivered more personal protective equipment and obligated all students and HCWs to wear KN95 or N95 masks during procedures. Over 1,500 patients were treated during the study period with more than a 30% reduction in comparison to those in the pre-COVID-19 period, but only 20 UQUDENT personnel had confirmed COVID-19 infection, and all proved to be community-acquired by contact tracing.

CONCLUSION

 The measures implemented in this study proved effective. With the challenges and limited resources, UQUDENT managed to resume the operation of its dental clinics and training while preventing cross-infection, and it ensured that dental students graduated with the required competency. Sharing experiences between educational institutes will help to graduate safe competent practitioners.

The Impact of COVID-19 on Dental Treatment in Kuwait—A Retrospective Analysis from the Nation’s Largest Hospital

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way dentistry has been practiced the world over. This study sought to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the patterns of attendance for dental treatment in a large hospital in Kuwait through comparisons with data from the year prior to the pandemic. Methods: A total of 176,690 appointment records from 34,250 patients presenting to the AlJahra specialist hospital in Kuwait for dental treatment from April 2019 to March 2021 were analyzed. The types of procedures and the departments in which they presented were analyzed, and the patterns of attendance before and during the pandemic were compared. Results: While there was a significant reduction in the number of orthodontic, endodontic, and periodontal procedures, there were no impacts on oral surgery, restorative procedures, or pediatric dentistry. Conclusions: There has been a return in the number of patients obtaining dental treatment; however, there has been a definite shift in the use of certain dental procedures.

Dental Care and Education Facing Highly Transmissible SARS-CoV-2 Variants: Prospective Biosafety Setting: Prospective, Single-Arm, Single-Center Study

With the arrival of the highly transmissible Omicron variants (BA.4 and BA.5), dentistry faces another seasonal challenge to preserve the biosafety of dental care and education. With the aim of protecting patients, students, teachers and healthcare professionals, this paper introduces a prospective sustainable biosafety setting for everyday dental care and education. The setting developed by dental clinicians, epidemiologists, and teachers of dentistry consists of a combination of modern technologies focused on the air-borne part of the viral pathway. The introduced biosafety setting has been clinically evaluated after 18 months of application in the real clinical environment. The protocol has three fundamental pillars: (1) UVC air disinfection; (2) air saturation with certified virucidal essences with nebulizing diffusers; (3) complementary solutions including telehealth and 3D printing. A pseudonymous online smart form was used as the evaluation method. The protocol operates on the premise that everybody is a hypothetical asymptomatic carrier. The results of a clinical evaluation of 115 patient feedbacks imply that no virus transmission from patient to patient or from doctor to nurse was observed or reported using this protocol, and vice versa, although nine patients retrospectively admitted that the clinic visit is likely to be infectious. Despite these promising results, a larger clinical sample and exposition to the current mutated strains are needed for reliable conclusions about protocol virucidal efficiency in current dental environments.