Dental Patient Assessment Paper

622 Words2 Pages

Introduction
Dentist and dental hygiene providers are an integral part of the whole healthcare system. They provide oral health services that help patients' maintain their dental health, as well as provide a standard of care that incorporates a level of quality patients' will experience, together with quality treatment patients' expect and deserve. Although the vast majority of dental patients' that who are able to go the dentist are generally well, it’s essential to be able to assess their overall well-being. Therefore prior to comprehensive dental work, it is our dental office policy to implement a patient assessment in order to evaluate for possible risk of complications that could develop due to a high blood pressure diagnosis. In this paper, information about the importance of monitoring dental patients’ blood pressure prior to dental treatment, what blood pressure means, as well as a scenario of an issue where more training is needed on how to use a manual blood pressure monitor as opposed to operating an automatic digital blood pressure monitor.
Why is checking patients’ blood pressure important? Part of the patient assessment includes checking …show more content…

Some important factors that give rise to hypertension are “smoking, stress, drugs, alcohol, nutrition, diabetes, obesity, and limited physical activity” (para. 2). According to research, since the dentist and dental hygienist both provide services to patients’ several times a year, they have the advantage to educate and increase the patients' awareness of the health concerns involved by having high blood pressure. (para.4). Both providers can help identify undiagnosed high blood pressure (hypertension) in the dental chair and refer the patient to their primary care physician for a thorough examination and diagnosis. (para.

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