Dental community unites to save the Special Needs Dental Clinic With the lease of the Special Needs Dental Clinic in North Perth being discontinued as of June 30, a parent of one of the dental clinic’s patients is petitioning to have the lease extended until a suitable equivalent facility can be found. When Joan Martin took her daughter Ruth to the Special Needs Dental Clinic in January, she was shocked to find out about the clinic’s imminent closure. “Ruth needed a follow up appointment, and the dentist looked at me and said: ‘I am not too sure where the follow up will be’. The dentist said they had notice that their lease is not going to be extended past the 30th of June and they did not know where they were going to go.” Joan quickly set up a petition for concerned parents and carers at the front desk of the dental clinic to request an interim extension of the lease until a purpose-built facility is completed. Identity WA has also promoted the request to sign the petition to its members and Joan has met with Sam Carrello from Dental Health Services and the Acting CEO of the City of Vincent. Joan is worried about the struggle to find an equivalent interim measure if the lease is not extended for the 2,500-plus people with special needs who rely on the service. “You have people come to the clinic who are non-verbal, people with high anxiety, people with autism,” Joan explains. “One of the joys of the Special Needs Dental Clinic is that they have four large surgeries. You, as a support worker or parent, can go and sit beside the person in the dental chair and hold their hand, for instance. The staff are trained and are fantastic. They desensitise patients over a long period of time so that patients like Ruth can go to the dental clinic with no problem at all.” The disruption to the service is also a great concern. “There is only one Special Needs Dental Clinic in Western Australia,” Joan adds. “At one of Ruth’s appointments, the next patient had flown in from Carnarvon, and there is a 14-month waiting list for recall. There's talk of moving to the large clinic at Fremantle, but it's upstairs, there is no parking immediately there and it has a shared waiting room. It is not an equivalent.” Joan will present the parents’ petition, along with letters from concerned parents, at the City of Vincent’s Council Meeting on March 23.
ADAWA has formally lobbied the City of Vincent and the Hon. Roger Cook (Deputy Premier of Western Australia/Health Minister) regarding the closure of the North Perth Clinic. Many ADAWA members also got behind the petition to show their support.
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March 2021 Western Articulator
