Should you ever find yourself holding a handful of your kid’s teeth and need emergency dental care, Royal Columbian Hospital isn’t the place to go, according to one Burnaby dad.
Keith Renfrey’s seven-year-old son knocked out seven of his teeth, including three permanent front teeth, during a shopping trip near RCH last week.
Knowing time was of the essence, Renfrey picked the teeth off the ground, packed up the family and headed to the New Westminster hospital.
Once there, however, he said they got no advice on what to do with the handful of teeth.
It wasn’t until he had waited for half an hour, he said, that he decided to take matters into his own hands and ask for some milk to store them in – something an off-duty nurse had suggested as the family was making its way out of the store to the hospital.
Staff eventually located an unopened carton after rifling through several food trays, according to Renfrey, but the family would wait another half hour before the most upsetting part of the experience took place – a nurse telling them the hospital was not equipped to deal with their dental emergency.
“The most important thing is timeliness to get those [teeth] back in,” Renfrey said. “I sat there for an hour while I went through admissions and triage and then sat and waited for a doctor, just to be told that they can’t help me, and I lost an hour.”
Renfrey was eventually able to contact his dentist despite it being a Sunday, but it was about three hours from the time his son’s teeth were knocked out before they were re-implanted.
It will now take three to six months before he’ll know whether they’ll survive or turn grey, brown and then die.
“It doesn’t look good when you wait three hours to get the teeth back in,” Renfrey said.
He’s now worried about the practical and emotional implications for his son if his teeth don’t survive, since he’ll have to be an adult before he can get implants, which cost thousands of dollars apiece.
“It’s hard enough going through your teens, let alone having three teeth missing…,” Renfrey said.
“In my opinion, I should have walked in the front door; they should have said, ‘Here’s some solution, go call a dentist or go see a dentist or go to Children’s’ or something, not to make me sit there.”
Fraser Health, however, said staff provided Renfrey with milk for the teeth, and the role of emergency departments is to deal with medical, not dental, emergencies.
“The physician must determine if there are any other injuries that need attention and treatment – this cannot be done at triage,” Fraser Health emergency program director Neil Barclay told the NOWin an email. “If the physician determines that no additional treatment is required, the patient would need to see a dentist for dental work.”
There is no dentist on call at Royal Columbian or any other Fraser Health hospital, according to health authority staff.
B.C. Dental Association spokesperson Bruce Ward said checking out potential injuries, like a broken jaw or concussion, should take priority over knocked-out teeth, but there are things parents can do.
If they’re up to it, popping the teeth back in place after rinsing them with milk (not water) is best, he said.
Storing loose teeth between the gum and lip will also help keep the root cells alive, as will storing them in milk.
The most important proactive step is finding out ahead of time how their dentist handles after-hours emergencies.
Ward said his association has information about how to handle dental emergencies on its website and has contributed information to the 24-hour HealthLink health advice phone line at 8-1-1.
He said it’s up to health authorities to decide how information about dental emergencies is communicated in hospital emergency rooms.
“The problem is that it’s not a necessarily priority until it is, until you’re sitting there with your kid and their teeth in your hand, then it’s a priority,” Ward said.
