Ottawa Charitable Dental Clinics Update – June/July 2013

Posted on July 31, 2013

featbigPODS Wins National Team Award

The Portable Ottawa Dental Service (PODS) was recently recognized with the Canadian Dental Hygienists Association Oral Health Promotion Clinic Team Award.  Together with the CDHA partner Crest Oral-B, the honour acknowledges the value of our creative initiative to improve the oral helath of vulnerable and underserved populations with a large group of volunteers using mobile dental resources.

New Volunteers

Dental assistants:

  • Manon Lisa Guitard
  • Katerine Muzar
  • Tessa Yhap

Dentists:

  • Frederic Le
  • Elie Maalouf

Extreme Makeover: Mission Edition

makeover“I am looking forward to smiling again”.

Thanks agian to Pierre Rozon, owner of Milident Dental Laboratory for donating prostheses to help make these new smiles possible.

National Film Board: The real cost of homelessness

Here At Home – in search of a cure for a 21st Century crisis is a National Film Board web documentary about a radical Canadian experiment that aims to prove there is a way to end chronic homelessness.

In Moncton, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver, filmmakers are shooting a series of short docs. Each is an intimate glimpse inside the worlds of “At Home” study participants, service providers and community members—a snapshot of the intense personal dramas unfolding across the nation. Fifty films will be posted on the Here At Home site between now and the end of the study in 2013. Check out some of th enrtries…

1) Here At Home: A Model Person
2) Here at Home: Honestly Painful
3) Here At Home: Evicted
4) Here at Home: The Wound Inside

improving access 3Roadmap to Improving Oral Health for the Homeless

In 2011, the American Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council released a report to provide a roadmap for necessary next steps to improve access to oral health care for vulnerable and underserved populations.

The committee indicated that to be successful, an evidenced based oral health system will need to:

  • Eliminate barriers that contribute to oral health disparities;
  • Prioritize disease prevention and health promotion;
  • Provide oral health services in a variety of settings;
  • Rely on a diverse and expanded array of pro­viders who are competent, compensated, and authorized to provide evidence-based care;
  • Include collaborative and multidisciplinary teams working across the health care sys­tem; and
  • Foster continuous improvement and inno­vation.

Though our efforts with The Ottawa Mission Dental clinic and the free PODS program are imperfect offerings, it does seem that we are heading in the right direction!

Clinic Statistics

Number of patient visits:

  • PODS – Portable Dental Clinic: 219
  • Ottawa Mission Dental Clinic: 6,590

Value of services:

  • PODS – Portable Dental Clinic: $34,678
  • Ottawa Mission Dental Clinic: $1,588,565

Volunteer hours:

  • PODS – Portable Dental Clinic: 291
  • Ottawa Mission Denal Clinic: 16,551