Oral health professional organizational, institutional, clinical and other leaders, including frontline dental professionals treating patients, in all Canadian jurisdictions, are making decisions each day on how to best manage patients and guide the professions in the context of the return to clinical practice during the COVID-19 pandemic. Oral health professional decision-makers at all levels are making decisions and providing advice and guidance in a highly complex, rapidly evolving environment, based often on imperfect and incomplete information.
Considering this need for accurate information to support decision-makers in the dental profession, Faculty of Dentistry researchers Drs. Paul Allison and Raphael De Souza, with research assistant Lilian Aboud and associate librarian Martin Morris, have generated a single high-level national expert document which Canada’s oral health regulatory authorities may then choose to consult in developing consistent guidance for their respective registrants at the Provincial/Territorial level. The report, titled "Evidence to support safe return to clinical practice by oral health professionals in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic: A report prepared for the Office of the Chief Dental Officer of Canada" [link to PDF], is a comprehensive review of the literature concerning key issues that inform the provision of oral health care by relevant providers in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. In producing this report, McGill researchers have effectively created a roadmap to advance population-level oral health through health promotion, disease prevention and professional/technical guidance with an emphasis on vulnerable populations.
According to Dr. James Taylor, Chief Dental Officer of Canada, in the report:
Canadian oral health practitioners are returning to practice in a very different environment to the one they left prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the domain of infection control and prevention. Oral health professional organizations, institutions, regulatory bodies and those in clinical care settings, in all Canadian jurisdictions, are making decisions each day on how to best care for patients and guide the professions in the context of the return to clinical practice during the pandemic. Further, they are having to make these decisions in a highly complex, rapidly evolving environment, based at times on incomplete scientific information.
In light of this, the Office of the Chief Dental Officer of Canada (OCDOC) commissioned McGill University to draft a comprehensive knowledge product concerning key issues that inform the provision of oral health care by relevant providers in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. Around this work, the OCDOC then convened a representative multidisciplinary knowledge-based group from the national oral health professional and federal government health domains. The group’s role was to work collaboratively to contribute to the generation a single high-level national document on the current evidence by the team from McGill. This document will then reside in the public domain to be accessible to decision makers as they carry out their respective responsibilities.