Avondale Dental Practice used the Department for Enterprise's Coronavirus Business Adaptation Grant to provide financial assistance towards implementing a new ventilation system, to help improve the indoor air quality in their dental practice.
Tell us a little bit about your business, when did you set up and what does your business offer?
ADP Limited (known and trading as Avondale Dental Practice) is a local dental surgery situated in Onchan. The company has been operating under its current management for over 15 years, but according to some elderly patients, there has been a dentist established at Avondale Court for about thirty years. We offer NHS as well as private dental treatments to patients from all over the Island.
How has the Coronavirus Business Adaptation Grant has improved ventilation in your business? What affect has this had on your working practices?
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic put enormous pressure on our business. Dentistry was one of the most heavily impacted areas due to dental professionals working in a patient’s mouth, where a significant amount of aerosols can be generated during dental procedures, presenting the risk to both staff and patients.
The Isle of Man Government put in place a set of mitigation measures starting from non-trading periods, where no dental services could have been provided or partially allowed service, where reduced numbers of patients could be seen involving the necessary fallow time (a period of time after procedures which generate aerosols, to allow droplets to settle and aerosols to disperse) after each aerosol generating procedure, such as scalings or fillings. These measures had reduced access to dentistry for patients as the number of appointments has been limited.
In order to improve indoor air quality and ventilation in places with heavy patient traffic and increased aerosols transmission (dental surgeries, patients waiting room, etc.) we decided to install the UVC (Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation or Ultraviolet C) air-filtration system*. Being located in quite an old building, we have to make do with quite poor ventilation caused by fairly small windows. A ventilation assessment, which was part of the Scheme requirement, calculated that having the air filtration system installed would improve the number of air changes from 70% to almost twice as much.
This offers peace of mind to our fantastic team of people who can treat patients safely on a regular basis. We still have stringent mitigations and with all this in place we can sleep a bit better.
Would you recommend the Coronavirus Business Adaptation Grant to other businesses, and what would be your top tips for going through the process?
This is the second grant our business has received as we have already benefited from Government support when going paperless. The process itself was fairly straightforward and quick. I would recommend checking available support on a regular basis and asking for advice even if businesses think the help would be unlikely.
The Coronavirus Business Adaptation Grant provides a grant payment to eligible Isle of Man businesses to support the costs of adapting a business following the affects of Coronavirus. Click here to find out more.
