Working With a Staffing Agency During COVID-19: What You Need to Know
Written by ashleybentley | May 13, 2020 | News
Working With a Staffing Agency During COVID-19: What You Need to Know
May 13, 2020 | News
By Rae Senger
This is the third in a series on reviewing your processes for re-opening.
What Our Agency is Doing...
As some states are nearing the end of their Safer-at-Home mandates, dental offices will start re-opening. For many of these offices, re-opening dates are tentative, but there does seem to be light at the end of the tunnel. The new reality of opening a dental health care facility on the heels of a pandemic is drawing closer.
Working with a staffing agency during COVID: What You Need to Know.
What our staffing agency is doing to ensure their professionals are safe in your offices.
Prevention of contamination and containment of biohazardous waste is nothing new to the dental industry. Dentists and their staffs have been committed to keeping patients and their work environments safe for years. However, as the dental industry gets back to work post COVID-19, dental professionals are faced with unique challenges in the form of additional OSHA, CDC and ADA guidelines that have been put in place to address working in an oral environment. In addition, social distancing requirements and the goal of re-calling patients and keeping schedules full do not align as they did in the past.
Staffing will be critical in the success of your business and the care of your patients. Some of your team members may not be able to return as soon as others. An additional doctor temporarily on staff to do exams on a heavy hygiene day could save valuable PPE resources. There may be an increase in sick leave requests as we emerge from the pandemic with a hypersensitivity to every little sneeze or cough. Life will go on and emergencies, vacations, and leaves for all reasons will continue to occur.
Additional staffing resources will continue to be needed. And now more than ever, locum tenens dentists and temporary hygienists can be a critical component to your business “bounce back” plan.
But you will want to choose carefully and have a solid plan in place with clearly defined processes, so you are setting the day up successfully. You will want to have good standard operating procedures so you and your team can clearly communicate your processes internally, as well as to any temporary staff you have coming in.
Here are just a few questions to consider: Will you want temporary staff to arrive in street clothes and change at your office? Where will they find extra coats and gowns? What do you want them to do with soiled lab coats? Are there traffic patterns that you have in place that they will need to be aware of? Have you built enough time in your schedule for hand scaling and decontaminating operatories? If you are not paperless, what processes do you know have in place for relaying call back instructions to front desk staff for scheduling?
Choose a reputable staffing firm that will help you navigate best processes.
Where you get your staff from and what compliance and safety measures that company has in place are now more important than ever. As a staff member, how are you choosing which agency/offices to work through? Choose your partner carefully.
At CDS, we have a strong commitment to safety. As a staffing agency, we have a two-fold concern: We need to ensure our employees are safe in your office AND that you, your staff, and your patients are safe with our dental professionals as well.
Complete Mobile Dentistry/Complete Dental Staffing has been providing staffing solutions since 2002. We have always worked with OSHA experts and have diligently monitored CDC, OSHA, and ADA guidelines to ensure we are following and educating our field staff and clients on common sense and best practice behaviors.
As we have navigated a post-COVID return to work plan for our field staff, we wanted to share some of our processes for integrating temporary staff into a clinic. We hope that our research, the processes we put in place, and the webinar we are sponsoring will be useful to dental professionals at large.
Complete Mobile Dentistry/Complete Dental Staffing recently sponsored a webinar for our staff and clients on navigating infection control in dentistry during COVID-19 featuring Nan Dreves, RDH, MBA President of Professional Health Horizons. The seminar filled to capacity with 48 business hours. To get takeaways and Handouts.
We take our responsibility to our field staff and to your office seriously!
Health Screening Survey: Processes have been developed for staff members to check in and complete a screening survey for each week of assignments. This allows us to check in with staff on any potential symptoms and risks, so we can have those conversations up front if there is a concern about the staff member working.
Increased Information Collection on Safety Measures: With each assignment request, CDS will be collecting information from your office regarding your specific efforts in maintaining healthy business operations so that we can convey that information to our professionals for their peace of mind and compliance.
We appreciate our highly qualified staff and we want to make sure they are safe!
Personal Protection Equipment For our Staff’s Safety: It is our policy that offices will supply necessary PPE to our booked staff, but to further ensure safety, we will send a basic PPE package to staff booked for multiple days through us. Our staff can count on us to do all we can to ensure their safety.
Empowering our Staff: To further protect our dental professionals, we are trying to be as transparent as possible upfront about what safety measures are in place. Our goal is to have our staff prepared to work their day with clear expectations of office workplace safety procedures. However, if when they arrive at an office, there are concerns about the precautions and protocols, we are encouraging them to contact us so that we can address those concerns between the office and the staff. We want everyone to feel safe in their work environment.
We are continuing to research, take feedback, and evolve our plan to ensure we have the best plan possible for our offices and staff. You can rest assured your patients are in good hands with our staff.
Complete Mobile Dentistry / Complete Dental Staffing recently sponsored a webinar for our staff and clients on navigating infection control in dentistry during COVID-19 featuring Nan Dreves, RDS, MBA President of Professional Health Horizons.
The seminar filled to capacity within 48 business hours.
Check out the the takeaways & handouts from the webinar!
Complete Dental Staffing can help you with your bounce back plan.
If you would like to learn more about working with CDS or having our staff in your office, please call 608-492-5752 for more information. Or, email rae@completedentalstaffing.com to let us know how we can help.
Rae Senger
Placement Specialist
Office: 608.492.5752