Thinking Outside the Dental Clinic

The search for quality and affordable dental care for children is a significant stressor facing families in our area. Scheduling an appointment with CCI can make things much easier for parents, allowing them to breathe a sigh of relief knowing their children will receive care from a team of clinicians eager to make a difference. But, unfortunately, not every obstacle goes away.

Inequities exist in many forms for our service population. For example, can parents take time off of work for an appointment? Can they arrange transportation? Our integrative approach to care sometimes means patients and participants require several visits with different specialists to ensure an effective care plan. What happens if families just can’t squeeze in another appointment?

These challenges can be difficult to overcome, but our patients and participants can always count on us for support. We take pride in working with them to break down barriers, and there’s no barrier we can’t break down together. All it takes is a little resourcefulness and a lot of passion for equity.

Over the past three years, the CCI team has experimented with combining several services within a single scheduled appointment to secure wholeperson health for our patients and participants.

A notable example is our ongoing efforts to incorporate behavioral health care in annual physicals and CenteringPregnancy® sessions.

Our success has encouraged us to explore bridging dental services with WIC through a pilot program launched in 2021. We chose these two services because they complement each other very well. Parents benefit from receiving oral health guidance as much as they do nutrition and breastfeeding counseling. And since our WIC specialists are welltrained in the connections between what we consume and overall dental wellness, adding dental hygiene resources was seamless for the team.

From December 2021 to February 2023, we asked our Gaithersburg WIC at CCI participants if they would like their children to receive fluoride treatment immediately following their WIC appointment. Our dental hygiene team set up shop inside the WIC center to make the process as smooth as possible for participants. Parents were happy to take advantage of the opportunity, and in the end, dozens of young children left with healthier teeth.

Our dental at WIC pilot showed a lot of promise. We plan to refine the strategy further to accommodate more patients and increase efficiency. It’s an innovative approach to improving accessibility, and it’s what our patients and participants deserve to maintain the healthiest versions of themselves without limits.