Volume 7 • 2020 • Issue 4

Using Teledentistry to Reach Patients During thePandemic In mid-March, Dr. Jeanie Luong was returning to work at her Toronto practice after maternity leave. “Then, the Royal College of Dental Surgeons of Ontario (RCDSO) recommended that all dental offices shut down except for emergency services,” she says. Her first reaction was to consider what it would look like to stay open for emergency care. What constituted a dental emergency? What kind of PPE did she have on hand? Would it be sufficient in preventing transmission of the novel coronavirus? Dr. Jeanie Luong Baywell Dental Centre, Toronto, ON “W hen the RCDSO clarified what we’d need to provide emergency services, which often requires aerosol generating procedures, we realized that we couldn’t do it,” Dr. Luong says. “We didn’t have N95 masks. We only had two boxes of gowns.” She closed the practice and spent the next week on the phone with her banks to figure out how long the practice could stay afloat without cash flow. The financial repercussions of the pandemic for younger dentists were daunting. Dr. Luong, born and raised in Toronto, has been practising for a decade, since she graduated from University of Toronto Faculty of Dentistry in 2010. She was an associate for five years, then bought an existing practice in downtown Toronto. “There’s a lot of speculation out there about what’s going to happen to dentistry after this part of the crisis ends,” she says. “But I know that a lot of these things are not in my power to control.” So instead, she thought about what she could control. “Although the implications of shutting down the office were overwhelming, I jumped into crisis management mode,” she says. “After a few weeks, I realized that the pandemic shutdown was likely going to last months and our patients were going to need help.” The RCDSO had compiled a list of dental offices that were open for emergency care, that included specialists and general dentists. “I thought I could help by setting up a screening protocol for my patients to help them navigate the care that was available,” she says. Through her website and social media profiles, Dr. Luong let her patients know that she, or her associate Dr. Sydney Cormier, could meet with them by Zoom, phone or email. “Using the RCDSO's definition of a dental emergency, I can troubleshoot the issue and refer the patient to a dental office most appropriate to their issue,” says Dr. Luong. “For example, if I suspected they needed an emergency upper molar root canal, I could prescribe antibiotics and direct them to an endodontist. I could also look at images of a chipped crown and give reassurance that treatment could wait.” News of Drs. Luong and Cormier’s free remote dental consultations were reported on blogTO.com and more I ssues and P eople 17 Issue 4 | 2020 |