Sustainability

Sustainability: “DPU goes green”

Did you know that patient and staff travel alone accounts for two thirds of carbon emissions in the context of dental work?

Short, environmentally friendly and as few trips as possible, can make a great contribution to sustainability in the medical sector and inspire the drive to use existing resources responsibly.

The DPU Dental Clinic in Krems, which can be reached by foot, is centrally located in the heart of the old town of Krems-Stein and offers its patients ample bicycle parking as well as a direct connection to the Krems city bus for environmentally friendly public transport.

Short distances are also a common thread in the design of the DPU Dental Clinic in Krems: Holistic, state-of-the-art all-round dental care is provided in over 50 treatment units. Technical dental work can be carried out in the in-house DPU laboratory without complicated transport routes, and the modern central sterilisation system enables standardised treatment of all instruments in-house. Referral to the individual specialist centres in the DPU Dental Clinic in Krems, with their professors and senior physicians, saves our patients further travel to distant neighbouring regions.

Digital Dental Practice: The Modern Way to the Future

Since the opening of the DPU Dental Clinic in Krems more than a decade ago, there has been no standstill in its technological development. One new feature was the introduction of the ability to take patient medical history digitally using intuitive tablets for our new patient admissions. This simplification of administration alone saves a lot of paper per year.

All our low radiation dose X-ray units are fully digital and therefore do not require the use of environmentally harmful chemicals for X-ray image development. The trend towards digital intraoral impressions in dentistry will also bring many innovations in this field in the near future.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Creating Awareness for Sustainable Use of Resources

All staff and doctors in our DPU Dental Clinic take great care of the use of consumables for our students and themselves. Given the size of our clinic, with over 50 treatment units, DPU focuses on the goal of sustainable merchandise management by using bulk packaging, refill products or recyclable disposables, and taking regular inventories. Structured warehousing and organisation of fewer ordering processes, such as only making large collective purchase orders, are already standard here.

“If everyone, whether students, doctors, staff, lecturers or patients, makes a small contribution to the environment, together we can achieve great things for the future!”

Despite all such sustainability measures in medicine, the quality and safety of dental treatment must always be in the foreground.

DPU is constantly interested in developing further in the sense of digitalisation and sustainability and in making its contribution here. Following this guiding principle, further projects are currently being planned and will be implemented in the DPU Dental Clinic in Krems in the near future.

Dr. med. dent. Pascal Grün and cand. med. dent. Philipp Dasser, are responsible for the Sustainable Dentistry department and, together with the administration and medical directors, are striving for consistent, continuous optimisation in favour of an environmentally friendly concept in patient care.