Dental Students Use Spring Break to Help the Poor

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30 March 2010 One Comment

For two days over Spring Break students at NOVA’s Medical Education campus got to know the poor and underserved of Northern Virginia, Maryland and Washington. Students enrolled in the Dental Assistant, Dental Hygiene, Emergency Medical Technician and Nursing programs volunteered their services along with area dentists, pharmacists and translators during the days of March 12 and 13 for the Northern Virginia Mission of Mercy Project, also known as MOM.

At 5:30 a.m. on March 12 the line to get into the Dental Clinic stretched out of the first-floor entrance of the Medical Education Building. The clinic check-in was nothing short of ordered chaos. Languages spoken casually included those that seemed familiar – Spanish, French and English – and those that seemed not as commonplace, such as Hindi, Farsi and Vietnamese. There were translators for many and several of the dentists spoke one or more of these languages fluently.

Are Free Clinics the Future of Healthcare?

The Washington metro area is one of the richest in the United States, yet the demand for free clinics is very high, and the unfilled void can be fatal. In Prince Georges County, Deamonte Driver died in 2007 of bacteria that spread to his brain from an untreated abscess.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has authored an amendment to the Senate’s health care reform bill that includes providing $10-$14 billion more for free clinics, including dental clinics. The provision, announced December of last year, would provide health care for an additional 25 million Americans.

“The additional resources will help bring about a revolution in primary health care,” Sanders said in a press release. The money would go to “new or expanded health centers in an additional 10,000 communities.”

Sanders said that his provision to the heath care reform legislation would “save Medicaid tens of billions of dollars by keeping patients out of emergency rooms and hospitals by providing primary care when they need it.”

Dr. Howard Kelley, director of the Dental Clinic, said most people are at MOM because they can’t afford care anywhere else. The people who come to MOM are recipients of social services in and around Northern Virginia.

The Northern Virginia Dental Association is responsible for contacting each agency that will participate and asking the group to send 50 beneficiaries of their usual services to MOM. The Northern Virginia Dental Society also invites member dentists to participate at the event and donates, delivers, unloads and stocks the supplies that are used during MOM.

“Students always look forward to seeing the preschoolers,” Kelley said. However, there were no children at the event. The ‘Give Kids a Smile’ event will take place later in the year in addition to a clinic day for those in the community with special needs.

On Friday alone, over 200 people signed up to work at the MEC Dental Clinic as receptionists, dental staff, translators and triage volunteers. Each dentist brought his or her own staff and accepted referrals for future services.

One woman, Myra Caceres, reported that she had lost her dentures two years ago and that here she “found help and got a gift from God.” Although her procedures could not be performed on site at the clinic, the dentists in the area will not turn away people in need of more detailed procedures.

The first 100 people who show up get in according to Kelley. He emphasized that around 800 people show up in addition to those receiving social services just to get in the door of the Dental Clinic as walk-ins. Many cannot be seen at the event.

The dental clinic has 32 fully equipped dental stations. NOVA has the largest dental clinic of any community college in the country. Volunteer Kenneth Bernstein blogged that over 400 people signed-in for treatment on March 12. Many probably needed multiple services, but each attendee was allowed only one treatment.

There have been 44 MOM events held by the Virginia Dental Association since 2000. The Medical Education campus has hosted a MOM event every year since opening in 2004. Before that, NOVA hosted the event at the school’s Annandale campus. To date, throughout the state, 34,398 patients have been provided with over $17.4 million of free dental services ranging from basic cleanings to root canal surgeries.

By: Emily Pfister

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