Triage and urgent dental care for COVID-19 patients in the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa

Abstract

Objective

This paper describes and reports the patient-specific characteristics of an urgent dental care clinic for COVID-19 infected, suspected, exposed or quarantined patients from March to December 2020 in the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa, Finland.

Material and methods

The triage and the treatment protocol were established based on the scientific data. Patient files were evaluated from the hospital district’s electronic medical record system. IBM SPSS software was used for statistical analysis.

Results

There were 1114 consultations and 257 visits at the clinic. Most of the patients were generally healthy with mean age of 35, had toothache and were suspected to be SARS-CoV-2 positive. Seventeen of the patients received positive tests for COVID-19 infection. The main treatment was tooth extraction, mostly due to caries. Statistically significant differences between COVID-19 infected and other patients occurred in age (45 vs 34 years-of-age, p = .009) and number of teeth (25 vs 28, p = .031). No SARS-CoV-2 infection transmission chains were traced to the clinic.

Conclusion

During the challenging pandemic time, patients were carefully screened by specialists in clinical dentistry and treated safely and effectively. Patient-specific characteristics revealed no differences between COVID-19 infected and other patients in terms of symptoms or treatment needs.