After experiencing a few growing pains, the Mobile Dental Safari is relieving toothaches. Community Health Center of Central Missouri (CHCCM) has loosed its new mobile dentistry unit on four counties. The large converted recreational vehicle contains three permanently mounted dental chairs where dentists may perform checkups and minor dental procedures. At one of its early assignments — Project Homeless Connect on Oct. 19 — a system in the RV failed. So, staff rolled out older mobile dental units to provide services to those who needed them. The RV is just another step in evolution of dental care the center provides, according to Cassidy Bax, CHCCM dental clinical manager. About four years ago, the center was taking clients who were referred through the Women, Infants and Children special nutritional program. “We weren’t seeing the amount of patients we thought we could see. Kids weren’t getting care anywhere,” Bax said. “We decided to go to the schools.” So the CHCCM — which provides primary medical care to under-insured or uninsured patients in Cole, Moniteau, Callaway and Osage counties — began taking much-needed dental equipment to sites in those counties in a brightly painted minivan. Dentists would not practice inside the first-generation vehicles. Instead, they schlepped equipment such as mobile dentist chairs and other equipment inside the sites they visited. That was disruptive to schools and nursing facilities the dentists visited, Bax said. “The units that we used previously were very heavy and bulky,” Bax said. “It was time-consuming to wheel things in… [Read full story]
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