Dear Patients, Families and Friends of JawFixers, We hope this message finds you during these unprecedented times. Our community has been through a lot over the last few months, and all of us are looking forward to resuming our normal habits and routines. While many things have changed, one thing has remained the same: our commitment to your health and safety!

We want you to know that we are open with precautions in place, and are looking forward to seeing you as soon as safely possible. We have carefully created a scheduling protocol that our team will begin utilizing as soon as our future schedule is in place.

We will be contacting you as soon as we can to reschedule your missed appointment. We appreciate your patience and understanding as every patient cannot be seen the first day we reopen. We have a staged approach to reopening the office as there are certain procedures that we will be able to perform before others.

• We have created a protocol based on current state and local guidelines for scheduling each procedure in the office. While we know that everyone needs to get into the office at the soonest available time, we have taken into consideration several factors such as time since each patient’s last appointment, what that appointment was for, the safety of patients and our team, and priority procedures such as true emergencies.
• Appointments will be managed to allow for social distancing between patients and minimizing the number of people in the office at any one time.

You may see some changes when it is time for your next appointment. We made these changes to help protect our patients and our team. The flow of our office will be slightly different.

• We will ask you to time your arrival at the office as close to your appointment time as possible. Please call our office when you arrive in the parking lot to make sure we are prepared for your arrival.
• You will be asked a series of pre-screening questions.
• If you are a new patient all registrations forms must be filled out online prior to your appointment.
• Everyone that enters the office will be required to wear a mask.
• We have hand sanitizer that we will ask you to use when you enter the office. Please refrain from wearing gloves.
• Our practice is turning into a patient ONLY practice. We ask that you arrive to our office alone. If you are having a procedure that requires anesthesia you will be asked to only have one driver accompany you. They will be asked to wait in the car for the duration of your procedure and will be called when time to come back into the office. If the patient is a minor, only one parent/guardian may accompany them.
• Temperatures will be taken upon arrival of anyone entering the office.
• You may see that our waiting room will no longer offer magazines, brochures, pens and so forth as those items are difficult to clean and disinfect.

Our policies and procedures regarding Environmental Cleaning & Disinfecting have not changed due to the Coronavirus. We have always used CDC and OSHA-mandated cleaning and disinfection protocols for all surfaces in our office and treatment rooms. We use a bacterial, virucidal, fungicidal and tuberculocidal disinfectant recommended for dental operatories, hospital surgical rooms, anesthesia machines and respiratory therapy equipment.

Our policies and procedures regarding universal precautions have been enhanced due to the Coronavirus. Universal precautions are an approach to infection control to treat all human blood and certain human bodily fluids as if they were known to be infectious for HIV, HBV and other bloodborne pathogens, (Bloodborne Pathogens Standard 29 CFR 1910.1030 (b) These precautions include:

• Hand Hygiene
• Barrier protection with personal protective equipment such as masks, gloves and eye protection
• Ultrasonic cleaning and sterilization of all non-disposable instruments We have now added airborne pathogen protection protocols as well.

These include face shields, isolation gowns and air purifying systems. We look forward to seeing you again and are very happy to answer any questions you may have about the steps we take to keep you, and every patient, safe in our practice. We value your trust and loyalty and look forward to welcoming you back.

Sincerely,

Dr. Rosenlicht & Dr. Ansari and the JawFixers Team