HEALTHY SMILES MOBILE DENTAL FOUNDATION (2024)

Healthy Smiles

Saving Smiles One Smile at a Time

Our mission is to provide healthy smiles for at-risk children where they are free from pain, able to enjoy better overall health and improved self-image that can contribute to their quality of life. Our model of care is designed to provide minimally invasive, comprehensive and compassionate oral health care for chronically under-served children in the agricultural heartland of California.

Our goals are to:
1. Increase access to restorative and preventive dental treatment for low or no income minority families
2. Instill life-long positive oral health behavior through education and screening

To increase access to oral health care, we deliver restorative and preventive dental treatment with two mobile vans, utilizing both traditional and teledentistry models, in school and community-based settings.

The program is designed to provide a dental home for our little patients, as services are on-going and episodic, based on the need of the school and/or community. As a school-based clinic we return to each of our 100 sites every six months and have become a dental home with an average of 72% returning patients...remarkable when considering the transient nature of our target population.

While we do provide restorative treatment, in this model of delivery of care strategies revolves around prevention, i.e. consistent preventive treatment and oral hygiene education. As such, we have seen an improvement in the oral health habits of our little patients, and with a 65-75% increase in the 'cavity free' exams...goal accomplished.
However, our philosophy is to shoot for the moon, so we aim for 100%!

With 26 years’ experience in delivering mobile dental care to children, Healthy Smiles is a licensed Community Clinic in California, and is qualified as a school-based health clinic…the good news is...we just serve way more than one school. In 2019, we served over 8,000 children in more than 100 schools across more than 15,000 square miles of ‘service area.’

We have developed wonderful partners over the years. Much of our success is attributed to the passion and drive of our school and community partners who reach out to the families in need and provide a trusted voice to bring those families to us for the first time. Once they receive care in the van, many children return year after year.

Healthy Smiles has recorded data since 1996 that shows we have increased service capacity from 1,500 children per year to over 8,000 children per year. We developed an oral hygiene education program that reaches children right in their classrooms. In 2004, we began providing more preventive services and have been able to place over 52,000 sealants to date with 25% of those sealants placed on primary molars.

In addition to our existing services, we are currently working to establish a model school-based sealant program in Fresno Unified School District, fourth largest district in California. Our goal is to build a funding base that will allow us to implement the program in all 20 of the districts we serve.

Further, we are currently working to establish a dental assisting program for ethnic minorities who don't think they have a chance at a professional career, and if they did, do not have the financial means to begin a career in the dental profession. Fees would be 15% of those for trade schools and or colleges, and format would allow them to enter into the workforce earlier with an established plan for a career path, debt free!