Mary Nashed
| Mary Nashed |
Mary Nashed, Brenda Yeung, Richard Ni
Joan Gluch
Division of Community Oral Health, Preventive & Restorative Sciences, University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine
Description
UCHC hosts dinner service for homeless community guests every Wednesday night at the Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral. During these dinners, the law, medical and dental schools set up booths where they offer services to the guests.
Project Overview
The community guests that attend the UCHC meals demonstrate a great need for dental care. Many members are partially edentulous, lack dental hygiene supplies, and oral health education. Due to restrictions posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, intraoral examinations were not permitted and therefore, we handed out dental hygiene supplies. Although dental goodie bags has helped address the demand for toothbrushes, floss, and toothpaste, this does not get to the root of the problem and does not aid the edentulous members of UCHC. To get a more comprehensive understanding of the barriers that the homeless experience in accessing dental care, we conducted a survey. From these responses, we aimed to: 1. Learn about the UCHC community members: their backgrounds, dental history and current needs 2. Understand the social determinants of health that affect and hinder the UCHC community members from accessing dental care 3. Develop a plan to address one of these barriers and monitor the effect of the intervention
Outcome
This is still an ongoing project but we aim to measure the outcomes of the project by partnering with Sayre to track patients’ dental progress. We will quantify how many guests from UCHC enroll as patients at Sayre and what treatments they need. With this information, we can tailor the educational brochures to address the dental concerns that this population may have as well as supply any oral hygiene products that they need.