It’s impossible for us to provide you with treatment and to comply with social distancing guidelines.
That doesn’t mean that we can’t provide you with treatment, but it does mean that we have to change the way that we work to make your treatment as safe as possible.
The way that we work during this phase of the pandemic is far from “business as usual”. It will look and feel different to you and there are vast implications for us as practitioners and business owners.
1. Telephone triage and screening
You’ll notice the first change to our service, before you even get to see us.
If you’re a regular client, you’ll know that we did away with our appointment reminder calls last year after we found that they increased last minute changes and cancellations. You’ll remember that we replaced them with a reminder text service.
We now have to reintroduce a pre-appointment phonecall, as a result of Covid-19 and potentially two phone calls in some instances!
Depending on the levels of community transmission (which we talked about it in our Road to Reopening blog), we may be required to triage you by telephone before offering an appointment. In those instances, we’ll be discussing your foot health issue with you, risk assessing and identifying ways in which we may be able to assist you without physically seeing you. This could include self care advice, provision of an off the shelf product to help you at home or the creation of personalised products to assist.
All clients will be required to undergo a Covid-19 screening process 24 hours before their appointment.
This screening process aims to identify clients who have been in contact with someone with Covid-19, or who are experiencing symptoms of Covid-19. Those people will have their appointment rescheduled for 14 days later and will be re-screened prior to receiving treatment.
As we know, people can have Covid-19 without showing any symptoms, so this will not entirely remove the risk involved in providing treatment.
2. Changes to the way we structure our day and book your appointments.
It’s a given that we can’t social distance in our business (we have to touch you), but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have to consider how we encourage social distancing where we can.
Our clinic is not large, it’s “bijoux” as the estate agents would say!
As we can’t make our space bigger to accomodate social distancing, we have to make the number of people in the space smaller.
So, we’re changing the way we work.
Since we took over the business, we’ve bucked the trend by offering a 45 minute appointment as standard. We don’t think you should feel rushed!
We now need to build in a 15 minute buffer between clients.
We’re doing this for a few reasons:
- To make sure that clients are not trying to arrive and leave at the same time, forcing each other to not maintain a social distance when entering and leaving the clinic.
- To ensure that we are able to thoroughly clean the clinical areas and all high touch communal areas in between clients.
Now, we could reduce the our appointment times to 30 minutes, which is the industry standard, to create this 15 minute buffer. We don’t want to compromise the quality of our care to do this, however.
So, we will now be booking appointments on a staggered, hourly basis with one Practitioner seeing clients on the hour and the other Practitioner seeing clients on the half hour. We will be asking all clients to attend their appointment on time and not early.
This means that we should have no clients arriving or leaving the premises at the same time, that communal areas are cleaned every half an hour and that clients are able to social distance from each other.
We will also be asking all clients to attend their appointment alone, unless they require a carer to attend with them, to minimise the number of people on the premises.
Where we’re lucky to count several members of the same household as clients, we will try to schedule appointments for the household at the same time.
All of this means that in a standard working day, we will be able to see 4 clients less than usual.
3. Continued focus on Hygiene and Infection Control
We have always taken infection control seriously.
We pride ourselves on our gold standard, 3 step sterilisation procedures. Our instruments are sealed in sterile pouches, which are opened at your appointment, in front of you.
All of our instruments are scrubbed with an anti-bacterial agent, are processed in an ultrasonic bath, are packaged and are then sterilised in a 134 degree, vacuum autoclave cycle.
If we need to use something that isn’t compatible with our sterilisation procedures, it is treated as single use and disposed of after use.
We encourage you to ask your service providers about their sterilisation and infection control procedures, for your peace of mind. No practitioner should mind you asking and should be able to answer your questions.
We are aware of practitioners reusing instruments on multiple clients, others simply boiling their instruments between uses, and others using surface disinfectants on their instruments. This wasn’t good enough before Covid-19 and that hasn’t changed. You deserve better than that.
We have always cleaned down our clinical work spaces between clients and communal areas daily. However, we are stepping up our cleaning protocols. We’ll now be cleaning high touch communal areas, such as the door handle and frame, every 30 minutes.
We will also be providing hand sanitiser gel at the entrance to clinic for clients to use on entering and exiting the building.
You’ll notice that we will be using hand gel during your appointment….on our gloves. We know that seems strange. We’ve not gone mad, we promise. Gloves are not sterile, so we’re just taking an extra precaution. If we need to touch something in the clinic while we are gloved, such as to get something out of a drawer, we’ll sanitise our gloves with hand gel before and after.
We think it’s always better to be safe, than sorry.
4. Increased Personal Protective Equipment
Ah, PPE! If you’ve not heard about PPE in the last 10 weeks, where have you been?
It’s been all over the news that there are chronic shortages of PPE and supply chain issues. Those issues are still there, the supply chain is more confusing and messy than it’s ever been and the cost of PPE has absolutely skyrocketed.
Regardless, PPE forms a key part of our ability to reopen in a way that protects you and us.
Prior to Covid-19, PPE was still something that we had to factor in to our work. We wore a fresh pair of gloves for each patient and you’ll have seen us wearing masks. Prior to Covid-19, we wore them to protect us when using our drills; nail dust is a known carcinogen.
During the pandemic, we all need to step up our PPE game.
The purpose of our PPE now is to protect both you and us.
As it is possible to have Covid-19, without showing any symptoms, the PPE we wear is based on the fact that anyone that we come into contact with may be infected. Including us!
We’ll be requiring all clients to wear a mask during their treatment. This protects us in the event that you are infected.
We will be wearing gloves, aprons, masks and eye coverings (visors or safety glasses). This is in line with current guidance from Public Health England and the advice of our professional bodies.
Hopefully, you now have a better picture of the way forward for our clinic and your care. Our promise to you is that we will always make your safety, our priority. If at any point we are unable to provide our services safely, we will postpone them until we are able to do so.
If you have any questions about the steps we’re taking to work safely in the new normal, please don’t hesitate to ask! Drop up a comment below or contact us.
