The COVID-19 pandemic has spread across the globe, causing millions of cases and disrupting the lives of people worldwide. The increase in the number of critically unwell patients has put healthcare systems under immense strain, requiring them to adapt their service provision to cope with increased demand. At Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust (GSTFT) in London, redeployment of healthcare staff has been used to relieve pressure on the most overburdened hospital sectors, and this saw clinical dental teams involved in auxiliary medical roles throughout much of 2020. On the cusp of the New Year, COVID-19 cases continued to soar and GSTFT opted to cancel routine care and re-implement a second round of clinical redeployment. Here, we discuss our experiences and present positive feedback of early-career dentists being redeployed to medical wards during the UK's greatest health crisis of recent years. CPD/Clinical Relevance: Clinical dental teams can positively contribute to the national COVID-19 response through the provision of urgent dental care, inpatient mouthcare services and auxiliary medical roles.

Patients with physical disabilities precluding functional use of their limbs can benefit enormously from the expertise of the dental profession. The dental clinician is able to not only meet the routine oral health needs of these patients, but possesses the unique skills and knowledge to provide specialised oral prosthetic appliances which can facilitate a range of independent activities. Mouth sticks, as they are commonly known, are dental prostheses that are held intra-orally by the patient and manipulated to perform numerous actions such as drawing, writing and painting. They have been well documented within dental and occupational therapy literature and reports of their fabrication date back over 150 years, albeit in a very rudimentary form. The enduring value of mouth sticks to the physically disabled population is that they can provide a degree of self-reliance which would otherwise not be afforded to them. This article discusses the evolution of mouth sticks, principles of mouth stick design, patient selection criteria and treatment planning considerations. We present two recent clinical cases where mouth sticks have been indicated and have been indispensable to the user, detailing the clinical and laboratory stages involved.