Oral Health Outreach Program
CQUniversity’s oral health students can better meet the dental needs of ‘at risk' populations in non-traditional settings thanks to a new $11,000-funded mobile dental program. Funded through the Australian Dental Health Foundation and Mars Wrigley Foundation’s Healthier Smiles Community Service Grants, a new portable dental kit (which resembles a large tackle box) and dental chair will be utilised in the ‘Lives Lived Well’ Rockhampton Residential Rehabilitation Centre.
Transcript
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We’re here on behalf of Oral Health and we’re here to help look after the clients within the dental centre here, so we're working with Bimbyada Bay lives of world Rehabilitation Centre to hopefully give clients a better oral health experience long term wise.
So we're lucky to receive a grant from the Australian Dental Association as well as Wrigley's Mars Foundation Grant to buy a portable Dental unit to teach both our oral health students as well as to improve Oral Health Access services to the clients within the centre. And long-term wise we're hoping to expand this to aged care facilities, to childcare facilities, and more clients around the region that have limited access to dental services.
So this is an Australian first Initiative for an oral health program to come out to be a lot more remote and doing mobile dental services, and so the community can have better and much broader access to dental services instead of going to the dental clinic we’ll come out to you.
So we can do checkups, fillings, cleans; so anything that's considered routine Dentistry we can do this now within a center, yep, without you needing to access a dental clinic anymore.
The program here has been absolutely valuable we've had so many clients that come from I guess very different backgrounds and perhaps from periods of their life where they haven't really been able to prioritize their own care and so being able to offer them this service, in-house while they're here a bit of a captive audience being able to I guess address their needs and get some healthcare outcomes some dental outcomes that are really valuable, that maybe they weren't able or too confident to access out in the community - and they have had just such great feedback about how more confident they are now how they feel better about themselves and how like their tooth pain is now gone, or um, some really common complaints that they had when they first came here have been able to be resolved through the work that the CQU Dental students and team have been able to provide.
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