Management of acute dental pain in adults within the AAA triaging necessary with Covid 19
We met with our colleagues from the Local Dental Committee. During the COVID crisis there have been 7 centres operating across Kent with just 3 seeing ‘hot patients’. The need to thoroughly clean surgeries between procedures restricts these to 14 patients a day.
Dentists have been working with a AAA triage system. This stands for Advice, Antibiotics and Analgesia. They have produced an advice document for their members which contains information familiar to most of us.
We all know that dental problems are not our responsibility although we often act outside our contractual and area of expertise out of sympathy. In this case one message is that dental pain is inflammatory in origin and that a combination of paracetamol and ibuprofen at maximum doses is effective and available OTC. Antibiotics are used to prevent the spread of infection in dentistry and not to relieve pain. Up to 80% of dental antibiotic prescriptions may be inappropriate. There are very few occasions where GPs should consider antibiotics for dental issues