As you all know, I help to manage the dental clinic for Health Care for the Homeless. One of the biggest issues many of our clients face is that dental insurance is extremely hard to come by and many dental services, even emergency ones, are extremely expensive. While our clinic offers free care for people without insurance and who qualify as homeless, we are only able to service a small number of patients because our clinic is only open once a week. As a result many clients have to wait weeks to see the dentist, even in an emergency.
Recently I came across a NPR article that looked at why more and more dental patients were showing up in ERs (something that is definitely not a foreign concept for many of the people we work with). According to a recent Pew Center study, more than 800,000 visits to the ER in 2009 were for toothaches and other dental ailments. I learned that in tough times when programs need to be cut, dental under state's insurance plans is typically the first to go. As a result people are not able to access care and instead of visiting a dentist/oral surgeon for lasting relief, they go to ERs which will only offer temporary help.
Some are talking about creating a position in the dental field similar to a nurse practitioner. These dental therapists would be able to perform both preventative and restorative care, and help decrease the burden that dentists face. The American Dental Association, who agrees that there is a dental crisis, is opposed to the idea of creating these midlevel practitioner positions. It is interesting to note that Minnesota and some Alaskan reservations already use these practitioners to fill the void in their communities.
