I tell you – when I first heard about the news of Desmond D’Mello reusing gloves, not washing his hands, and using unsterilised equipment, I felt ill; and I’m not even a former patient!
That feeling of sickness is something that has been shared amongst many of the former patients who have discovered in recent weeks that they have potentially been exposed to horrendous blood-borne infections like HIV and Hepatitis.
As each day goes by and we accept more and more claims, we’re hearing hundreds of horror stories from former patients about the things D’Mello would allegedly get up to.
The really common ones that practically every former patient now claiming with us has mentioned is how rushed he was, and the issue about the gloves. The gloves is a hugely recurring theme for almost all of the people we speak to; but up until the news about his NHS infection control breaches had been published, people had never recognised the link between the gloves and the dangers.
The last part is very important to understand – people have now, upon reflection, remembered these things, but never properly processed that it was an issue. Given how nice and well liked D’Mello was, you can’t really blame anyone for not making that link sooner.
So, the gloves – the allegations from the film footage showed evidence of reusing gloves between patients. Hundreds of our clients have made comments like the following:
- He’d often already be wearing gloves when you went in for the appointment
- He’d call people in whilst already wearing gloves
- He’d be rushing up and down corridors wearing gloves whilst handling patient records etc
- He’d often never change gloves between family appointments
All this can lead to contamination on gloves that are meant to be fully clean to stop the spread of germs and infections when inspecting and working in the mouth area.
The things is, knowing what people know now, many have realised that they simply never saw him change his gloves.
Again, people never questioned it, as people always trust that hygiene is a standard that is always met by professionals like D’Mello. Although it’s important to inform you that some of the people we act for actually left the practice because of concerns relating to hygiene – and those people typically worked in careers where hygiene was something they dealt with daily which is probably how they noticed it.
Most people are nervous enough when it comes to dental appointments, so people are not looking out for breaches of hygiene standards; they’re concentrating on getting out of the dentist chair as soon as they humanly can.
So the horrifying truth may be that D’Mello rarely ever changed his gloves! Disgusting!
But we’ve also heard stories where he’d been spotted leaving the toilets whilst wearing the gloves, which doesn’t come as a surprise given that patient records and equipment were allegedly being kept in there. But you never know – he may have even relieved himself whilst wearing the same gloves as well. It’s a sickening thought, and we can only speculate about this, as no one can truly know just how badly he breached the rules.
Unless of course he comes clean about it all – but we doubt that’s going to happen.
