A Minnesota dental practice incident highlights critical gaps in how dental offices vet vendors and contractors. Practice owners should implement background checks for all staff with building access, ask third-party vendors about their hiring and vetting processes, and establish safety policies like requiring employees to leave together.
- The Minnesota case involved a cleaning service employee accused of abducting and assaulting a dental staff member, raising questions about vendor vetting practices.
- Many practices fail to ask third-party cleaning vendors about background checks, hiring standards, and liability insurance coverage.
- Practices should apply the same background-check standards to cleaning staff as they do to clinical and front-office employees.
- Implementing a simple policy requiring two or more employees to leave together is a low-cost safety safeguard most practices haven't formalized.
The allegations in a Roseville, MN, case as reported in this DrBicuspid.com article are harrowing: A man is accused of abducting, assaulting, and terrorizing a dental office employee as she left work. One detail has many dentists concerned: The accused, Pao Yang, worked as the practice's office cleaner.
For dental practices, the case raises uncomfortable questions that rarely get attention: How well do you know the people who have access to your office after hours? Are these individuals employed by your practice or by a service your practice contracts with?
According to Alan Twigg of Bent Ericksen & Associates, who advises dental practices on human resources and compliance, the issue extends beyond a single bad actor.
Alan Twigg.
"This is more about overall practice security and safety, though it definitely overlaps with HR," Twigg said. "It's one reason many practices have a policy that at least two or more employees must leave the practice together."
That policy, Twigg noted, is a simple, low-cost safeguard many practices haven't formalized and one worth revisiting regardless of who handles the cleaning duties.
The bigger blind spot, according to Twigg, may be how little practice owners know about the people who clean their offices.
"I'm not sure what percentage of practices use an outside cleaning service versus employing cleaners directly as W-2 employees," Twigg said.
"If it's an outside company, practices can certainly ask that company how they vet and hire their employees, whether they conduct background checks, and what liability insurance coverage they carry," said Twigg.
For practices using a third-party cleaning vendor, that conversation costs nothing and takes only a few minutes, yet many practices never have it, instead assuming a vetting process is in place. For practices that employ cleaning staff directly, the same background check standards applied to clinical and front-office hires should extend to anyone with a key to the building.
Yang's case is ongoing, and he is presumed innocent unless proven guilty. But for practice owners, the case prompts some useful questions worth asking, such as:
- Who has access to your office?
- Who vetted them?
- And does your team have a policy for leaving safely at the end of the day?
A criminal complaint is merely an allegation. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
