Blackstone Valley Community Health Care, which provides medical and dental services to patients in Pawtucket, Central Falls and surrounding areas, has signed on to be a clinical affiliate of the Boston University Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine.
Under the agreement, dental students will work full-time in 10-week rotations at the facility, providing preventive and diagnostic care under the supervision of Dental Director Dr. Lalita Bhattacharya and other dentists on the staff.
Bhattacharya answered questions about the Pawtucket clinic and the new affiliation.
PBN: What kinds of patients do you serve?
BHATTACHARYA: It is both adults and children. A large population is children, but it’s for both, all the way to the elderly also. We see people from various nursing homes. We provide emergency care, preventive care and restorative work – cavities, extractions – for all ages, but the emphasis is mainly on preventive and restorative care, to make their mouth cavity-free, disease-free as much as possible. … We see Medicaid [patients], quite a bit, we see some with private insurance, and others pay on a sliding-scale payment schedule, based on the guidelines from [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services]. … At the present time, you have to be a patient of the medical center to get dental care.
PBN: How big is your patient roster, and how big is your team?
BHATTACHARYA: I wouldn’t be able to give you an exact number of patients, but we see thousands. We have five dentists who work five days a week, Monday through Friday, and we also have an oral surgeon who comes about once a week, as needed.
For the oral surgeon, we have a long waiting list. For regular appointments, we are able to see people right away for an emergency, because we have enough cancellations and no-shows. Regular patients who don’t have an emergency, we may be able to see in no more than 48 hours. It works very well because of having five dentists.
PBN: How good has your patients’ dental care been before they come to see you?
BHATTACHARYA: We have a large population of people who have neglected their mouths, partly because of their financial situations. Many of them have lost jobs and may have had dental coverage before but don’t have it now, or haven’t had it for two or three years and did not maintain it. That is one major part, and the other major part is that many of them did not know of our existence, and we as dentists need to educate them about the need for dental care as part of their health care.
PBN: How important is dental care to people’s overall health?
BHATTACHARYA: With children and teenagers, we handle an enormous amount of dental decay, and that has a lot to do with lack of proper nutrition. They are establishing a pattern where it will harm them for the rest of their lives, because they have many potential infections in their mouths as a result of extensive decay.
With middle-aged and elderly populations, they have other systemic diseases, such as diabetes, high blood pressure and heart problems, and they have enormous amounts of infections in their mouths, or potential infections. Any of them can flare up at any time and cause problems for their physician to manage their general health. For example cardiac patients, if somebody is going to go for cardiac surgery, they should have as close to an infection-free mouth as they can for them to have an adequate recovery.
PBN: Tell us about the new affiliation with Boston University.
BHATTACHARYA: Boston University dental students, in their fourth year, go out into clinical settings to get hands-on training and get an idea of real-life clinics, how to treat patients. Boston University has been interested in this particular facility for awhile, and now we have a state-of-the-art clinic, with electronic records, digital X-rays and everything else. … A lot of the students are also interested in public health issues, so they found this center very interesting.
[As part of this program], I am now a member of the faculty of Boston University, and I will maintain them as my students here. They are qualified to treat patients, because they have been trained and certified – not in all but quite a few procedures that we do. Each time they see a patient, I will have to go in and specifically approve it … based on what they’re qualified to do. … It will increase the number of patients I personally see, and my efficiency will go up significantly, while they’ll get a lot of experience. And it’s good for us, personally speaking, because students also keep us on our toes, so we also stay on top of all the knowledge. …
I’m also hoping – and I see some signs of it – that some of them will be very interested in staying with the public health clinic, whether this one or something in their own hometown. The need is enormous, enormous, because the majority of [low-income patients] cannot get any treatment; a lot of private practitioners do not take Medicaid. The need is there, and it just has to be done.
