Grant Increases Dentists for Uninsured
By Cynthia T. Pegram
Lynchburg News and Advance
Thursday, June 12, 2003
Dental care, a serious health care need for the working poor, is the focus of a new venture between the Free Clinic of Central Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Dentistry, and area dentists.
The project is funded by a $157,000 grant from the Virginia Health Care Foundation and is for the working poor who have no insurance.
“This will give us a chance to at least make inroads on those needs,” Free Clinic Executive Director Robert Barlow said Wednesday.
The Free Clinic was notified this week that the Virginia Health Care Foundation had awarded the grant for a plan which brings dental students and dental hygienist students to the Free Clinic to work under the supervision of local dentists volunteering their time.
The grant is to be allocated over three years, beginning with a $70,000 allocation. “They gradually reduce the amount they give you because you’re supposed to provide more local support from the local environment,” Barlow said. “It’s kind of like seed money.”
The program will start full time in late August in the clinic at 1016 Main St. in Lynchburg.
The Free Clinic has offered limited dental services since the late 1980s, but is often limited to extraction of teeth with no restorative care (fillings) or dental hygiene services.
During the last two years, about 500 patients have had dental treatment at the Free Clinic for three to four hours on Tuesday and Thursday nights, said Barlow.
The waiting list stands at 300, with most patients having a four- to six-month wait to sit in one of the clinic’s three dental rooms.
“We’ll be adding as much as 20 to 24 hours a week of additional services a week for indigent people,” said Barlow.
“We anticipate we should be able to triple our patient load,” said Barlow. “When we get things going smoothly, we should be able to pick up between 1,200 and 1,500 additional dental appointments.”
Those patients will be able to get the restorations and the hygiene services.
Centra Health and Centra Health Foundation are involved in putting the plan together, as are local dentists who will teach the students, and VCU’s school of dentistry and the school’s Division of Dental Hygiene.
Dr. Augustus A. Petticolas Jr., chairman of the Free Clinic board’s dental subcommittee, said collaborative approaches are part of the Free Clinic board’s strategic plan.
“It has been a slow process,” said Petticolas. “But the wonderful thing about this program that we’re so excited about, it will take one dentist, and this one dentist will supervise three providers (the students).
“We’re leveraging the resource we have … and as a result we’ll be able to have three chairs operating for three days a week,” said Petticolas. “It is a huge leap forward. It is something we’ve been striving for and hoping for.”
The supervising Lynchburg dentists will be approved as VCU adjunct faculty.
The students working on the Free Clinic patients will come to the task with a great deal of knowledge.
Dr. David C. Sarrett, assistant dean for academic affairs for VCU School of Dentistry, said most of the last two years of dental school is spent treating patients. “Not only at the external clinics, but we run our own clinic within the dental school,” he said.
By their fourth year, he continued, “the majority of work is basically treating patients.”
In work in settings like the Free Clinic, he said, “it’s great for the patients, but maybe even better for our students — they also learn and gain appreciation for the need to provide services to the people who don’t have access to services.”
Petticolas noted that the clinic will now be able to provide the much-needed preventive care through the work of the dental hygiene students. At VCU, the dental hygiene program is a four-year degree.
Janet L. Scharer, director of the division of dental hygiene for VCU, said that the dental students and the hygienist students will work together as a team in Lynchburg.
If they don’t want to travel daily to Richmond, students will have the option of staying at intern housing provided by Centra Health.
Scharer said that although the Free Clinic of Central Virginia is the first to establish the relationship with VCU outside of Richmond, other Free Clinics are working to develop similar rotations.
Scharer said the Lynchburg plan, with its grant from the Virginia Health Care Foundation, “makes for a very stable program” and the collaborative nature, allows for “three or four times the services to be delivered.”
“What we really like about it is the partnership component,” she said. “It is the real-world experience, and complementing the experiences they’re getting at the dental school (and) it is also an opportunity to work in environment like Lynchburg.”Contact Cynthia Pegram at cpegram@newsadvance.com (434) 385-5541.
Return to Newspaper Articles