Sarah Luetke, founder and CEO Sound Dental Care, joins Suzanne to talk about breakthroughs in geriatric dental care and services. COVID changed a lot of things for a lot of people, and the pandemic really sped up tele-dentistry and mobile dentistry. If you Google mobile dentistry, there are many many people - providers, whether it be dentists, hygienists, dental therapists, denturists - starting to be mobile. Thinking outside of the box of traditional dentistry is really opening up doors. Tele-dentistry allows an offsite dentist to supervise a hygienist or diagnose something and give them permission to treat a patient in a different way.
If you have a senior loved one who's in a senior living community or goes to a community center, there are are services available for people who might not necessarily be able to make it into a dental office to bring dental care to them. Washington state law that allows hygienists to operate independently in certain settings: Sound Dental Care only cares for patients 65 and older at nursing homes and senior centers. As a mobile firm, she has less overhead and be more mindful of seniors on fixed incomes, anyone that no longer has an active paycheck coming in. And oftentimes people no longer have dental insurance once they are no longer with their employer dental insurance.
The pandemic evolved mobile dentistry. When Sound Dental Care started in 2016, they did bring a dental chair with them into the senior living community - a patient chair, dental chair, and an operator chair, as well as the whole ultrasonic, suction, and everything else you'd see have at a dental office. But due to the pandemic, a lot of these facilities could not buy state mandates to let patients out of their room. For her hygiene practice, she prefers to take everything into the building. As a denturist, she has a mobile denture van; the patient is still in the building, but if she need to go do something with their dentures, she has a lab right there. There are other providers that have patients come into their van or their motor home for services. But Sound Dental Care works with patients who need assistance moving about, and they're higher-risk patients, so they are better cared for in the building. And that makes sense, too, because staff is there, in case of a problem, with a dementia patient who might have a panic attack.
Sound Dental Care does many preventative type treatments, including alternative palliative care with silver diamine fluoride. It used to be used in the United States, but we shifted to the use of local anesthetic, drilling and filling, and when patients started thinking cosmetically. It is a liquid antimicrobial containing silver and fluoride, and silver ions, and it halts decay in a cavity or a tooth that's broken off.
In our next segment, Sarah and Suzanne will talk more about advances in geriatric dental health. Learn more at https://www.sounddentalcare.com/ or call 206-745-3808.
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