UIC dental students take services to children and disenfranchised

In the summer of 2008, UIC dental students opened a dental clinic at a community agency that assists homeless adults become self-sufficient through employment and supportive services.

The director of Goldie's Place, Johanna Dalton, said dental health is an important part of the array of attributes and attitudes necessary to negotiate the transition from the streets to the workaday world. Most middle-class people take such employability attributes for granted. For homeless people, they are anything but.

"There are very few sources of dental care available to people who are homeless," Dalton said. "Yet exhibiting good dental hygiene and being pain free are essential elements of employability and maintaining stable employment."

Or, as it says on Goldie's Place website: "Nothing kills an interview like a missing tooth."

The UIC students are providing routine dental services such as cleanings, fillings and extractions. Henry Schein Cares, the foundation arm of Henry Schein Inc., provided the equipment to put the clinic in business, and the College of Dentistry chipped in with the loan of three dental chairs and other equipment.

Community-based service learning experiences are required of all fourth-year UIC dental students at sites throughout Chicago, Rockford, Colorado and Guatemala. In 2007, 16,000 procedures were conducted at the sites. The dental students also expanded their efforts to underserved Illinois children starting in January 2008 thanks to a $1.5 million grant from the Illinois Children's Health Care Foundation.

"The College of Dentistry recognizes that it is imperative to graduate more dentists prepared to meet the needs of underserved communities and Illinois' children," said Dr. Caswell Evans, the dentistry college's associate dean for prevention and public health sciences.

"One of our current goals is to prepare an oral health-care workforce that is competent in and committed to addressing the oral-health needs of vulnerable and underserved populations and to play its part in eliminating health disparities."

View all in the sampling of the articles in the 2008-09 Annual Report.