NSHCF helps organize new... dental health task force

Based on input from our board member/town dentist, Dr. Alyssa Hedstrom and Allison Heeren, our District 166 School Nurse, the Foundation has determined that many of the children in Cook County are not receiving proper dental care. Annual checkups to follow-up dental work. There are many reasons for this problem. For example, many parents in Cook County work multiple jobs and find it very difficult to find time to bring their children to the dentist. But a basic underlying factor is many of those parents cannot afford the dental care for their children, cannot afford to purchase health insurance, and don’t qualify for the reduced health care insurance programs the State of Minnesota offers.

The real problem is that dental health issues not only make it difficult for children to be successful in school (it’s hard to learn when your mouth hurts), but can really affect a child’s overall health.

Once this problem was identified, a task force was formed to determine the actual extent of the problem and to seek solutions. Board members are involved, as are volunteers from the Sawtooth Clinic, the School District, Public Health, and Grand Portage Health Services. In order to reach all pre-school and school-aged children, informational letters and questionnaires were sent to all parents of school children, including all charter schools, the Reservation and to as many home-schooled children as we could identify. Results of those questionnaires are being evaluated, to determine our success in reaching those children and their parents, and to find other ways to get the word out that we are trying to find ways to make dental care more accessible and, hopefully, more affordable.

Dr. Hedstrom recently held a “Give Kids a Smile” day and a pre-school screening day, where she and her dental assistants and hygenists saw 45 children, providing exams,
prophylaxis, surface sealants and bitewing x-rays. This first test program will help us determine the extent of the problem in Cook County, and provide an estimate of overall cost to bring dental exams and follow-up dental care for as many children as we can reach.

Our goal is to set up an annual process in Cook County to bring good dental care to these children, working with the schools to provide evaluations on-site as much as
possible, and providing follow up care at Grand Marais Family Dentistry.

Because she had just remodeled her clinic, Dr. Hedstrom was able to donate dental chairs and Panorex x-ray units to both the 166 school district and to the new Grand
Portage Health Service facility, which will help make the school-site annual evaluations possible.

Funding to accomplish all this will be a combination of Dr. Hedstrom and her staff’s volunteer time, task force volunteers’ help, parent’s health insurance, state health insurance, the Sawtooth Clinic’s sliding scale program, and grants from various
organizations, including the North Shore Health Care Foundation.

Future editions of the newsletter will describe our progress in organizing our annual dental care process.


UPDATE ON ORAL HEALTH TASK FORCE September 2011

Originally organized by the North Shore Health Care Foundation (NSHCF), the task force has grown to become a true community effort. Now chaired by Rita Plourde, CEO of the Sawtooth Mountain Clinic, it includes our school nurses, local dentist and representatives from all our social service agencies, the Grand Portage Reservation Health Service and the NSHCF.

Our mission is to provide oral health care to the children of Cook County and the Grand Portage Reservation.

The task force has defined our goals which are complex but designed to make the best use of our resources:

• Establish a very complete and accurate “needs assessment” to clarify exactly how many children in our area have medical assistance and need preventative and restorative oral care.

• Develop educational tools that describe the necessity for early preventative care (starting at 18 months) and what services and financial resources are available for parents. And ensure that these materials reach the parents of every child in Cook County and on the Grand Portage Reservation.

• Continue and improve the availability of children’s oral screenings and preventative and restorative care.

To cover the cost of this process, we’ve filed grant applications with four funding organizations. To date, two have been awarded, one by the Carlton-Cook-Lake-St. Louis Community Health Board and another by the NSHCF. In addition, this week the Lloyd K. Johnson Foundation made a site visit to discuss our application and its goals. The remaining grant application is under review and we expect to hear from them in late September.

As we’ve worked through the process of organization, with the participation of our social service agencies, school nurses and our dentist, we’ve learned a lot about what needs to be done to ensure every child in our area has access to quality, affordable oral health care. We believe that by eventually treating all of our children while they are still very young, we will be able to greatly improve oral health, which has the added benefit of reducing the cost of oral health care to their parents and to the community.