Guidelines for Dental Care
Half-way through Pet Dental Health Month seems a great time to get the team together to review the 2019 AAHA Dental Care Guidelines for Dogs and Cats. This second edition builds on the first such document put out in 2013 and lays out what every clinic should be doing. This is not Ivory Tower stuff and not for specialists. These guidelines are intended to help the primary care provider do general-practice dentistry properly. Go through this document to see if there are areas that need attention and then put a plan in place to make the necessary changes.
If you find you are fully up-to-speed with the AAHA Guidelines, pour yourself a cuppa and sit down with the much more in-depth World Small Animal Veterinary Association Global Dental Guidelines from 2020. Thank you to the Journal of Small Animal Practice for publishing all 126 pages and making it open-access. This document is more like a text book on veterinary dentistry rather than just guidelines. It has loads of full-colour clinical photographs and intra-oral dental radiographs. Since this has been posted as open-access I have taken the liberty of converting it to a high-resolution pdf and as a lower-resolution (much smaller) version for you so you can easily save it and share it with team-members.
