| Dentalgram |
January 2002
|
Dental and dental hygiene
students provide care at
Saul Martinez Elementary School
by Ron Forde
 |
|
Parents of children
at Saul Martinez Elementary School have received dental treatment
through the service learning department.
|
The service learning department has reached another milestone in its
efforts to bring dental care to the regional community. On September 25,
five senior dental and two senior hygiene students provide dental care
to adults at the Saul Martinez Elementary School.
In the School’s fifth year of providing dental treatment in the Coachella
valley, this is the first time adults have been treated at this facility.
For some time, there had been the desire to provide dental treatment to
a limited number of the parents of children who attend the school. We
know that when children in a family have limited access to dental care
so do the parents, and that treating only the children in the family does
not impact the family as fully as treating the entire family.
With this in mind, the department worked with Ms. Paula Thayer, school
principal, to find a way to make this idea a reality. We also worked with
the local School Board to receive permission to bring adults from the
community onto the school campus for treatment after hours.
These issues were resolved by deciding to run the program on the day of
the School’s Parents Conference. And so during the afternoon and
into the early evening hours, we screened and treated 12 adults, performing
heavy duty scaling and polishing, as well as amalgam and composite restorations
and extractions. It was a tired group of students who left the desert
clinic that night, but the work done was much appreciated by the patients,
and word of our work has spread through the community .
We plan to repeat this program once per quarter throughout this academic
year, and the date of our next “adult” session is currently
being selected. It is our expectation that by involving parents in this
program, and by raising their level of dental awareness, they can be partners
with us in improving the oral health of the children we treat.
Those involved include D4 students David Castillo, William Carter, Sherry
Edwards, Michael Cho, and Lan Dihn. Judy Lim and Liesl Ruhl, senior dental
hygiene students, also participated.
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