Category: Blog

Sawadee Ka, I am from Khon Kaen University (KKU) in the Northeastern region, “I-San”, of Thailand.  In 2008, I was back from the University College London, UK, after pursuing my PhD in Developmental Biology focusing on the cleft formation. At KKU, I am a senior lecturer of the Division of Pediatric Dentistry, Faculty of Dentistry, where I am responsible for teaching dental students and providing care for children in our Dental Hospital.  One of the burdens I was facing at that time, was giving emergency dental treatment for children with cleft lip and palate. Prevalence of children born with orofacial clefts in I-San is the highest among other regions in Thailand. The KKU Center of Cleft Lip Cleft Palate and Craniofacial Deformity was established in the year 2000, to systematically tackle this health issue by an interdisciplinary team. These children were mostly from underprivileged family backgrounds. The limited access to appropriate oral health care has reflected in severe and untreated dental caries since they were in the preschool age. Their complicated congenital craniofacial deformities that greatly affected feeding and appearance had taken all the attention from the family, therefore brushing the child’s teeth was usually the last thing in their mind. We soon realized that increasing the family awareness on maintaining good oral health and providing access to dental care should be incorporated as part of the cleft treatment protocol.

After joining the KKU Cleft Center in 2010, I led a social service project entitled “Big Smile, Bright Teeth” to improve the oral health status in children with clefts.  A holistic approach was implemented by creating a fast track for regular dental examination and treatment, at the time when patients attending the Center for other healthcare, such as speech training. The significance of good oral health and instruction for oral care at home was given to the parents, via empowerment group activities, at early stage and regularly in the cleft protocol. Dental students both undergraduate and postgraduate had volunteered to help providing dental treatment for these children, in which they also learn to work with the special needs, their families and with the interdisciplinary professionals. It had been a pleasant experience for these future dentists and the young specialists. I hope that they would carry on working with children with special needs in the future.  Ten years on in the project, we have clearly seen the reduction of untreated caries in our preschool children.

As my background was mainly involved molecular biology, I had gained some valuable experience in research in dental public health via a workshop in 2010, supported by NIH Fogarty Funding, entitled “International Workshop on Clinical Research Methods in Oral Health”.  This is a part of the jointed training program organized by KKU Faculty of Dentistry, Thammasat University Faculty of Dentistry, and University of Washington School of Dentistry.  Following the workshop, I had been recruited in a few clinical research teams funded by NIH. All of these give me the courage to take on clinical research in children with cleft lip and palate, alongside with improving the sustainability for oral health care for them.  We are now setting up a network with local primary care centers around the I-San as well as become part of a Global Task Force “Cleft without Caries”.  This is my small journey and I enjoy it very much!

Hello, my name is Brenda Okumu from Kenya. I graduated with a Bachelors in Dental Surgery from the University of Nairobi and later pursued a Masters in Dental Primary and Public Health at the University of Western Australia. My passion is in oral health promotion and research. Recently I have been a beneficiary of a thesis publishing program, a partnership between the University of Washington and University of Nairobi. Sitting at the experienced feet of Prof Ana Lucia Seminario and Prof Arthur Kemoli has been a great eye opener into world-class research and publishing. For the last 10 years I have been teaching at the School of Dentistry, Moi University. Currently I am at the department of Community, Preventive Dentistry and Periodontology, and have been the outreach coordinator since 2016.

Doing outreach is not only our co-operate social responsibility as an institution but also a key strategy in eliminating and preventing the impact of oral disease particularly among high risk, resource limited populations. We mainly target health schools in slum areas and children’s homes within Eldoret town and its environs for oral health education, free dental check-up, and basic treatment such as extraction. For comprehensive management we refer the patients to our facility at the school for subsidized or free treatment. Although the main participants are our faculty and students, over the years we have often partnered with visiting Indiana University dental faculty and students. It is through this partnership that to a large extent we have been able to sustain most of the activities, including offering free or subsidized treatment at the school. We also partner with Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital and Colgate Palmolive Limited, who have often provided manpower, materials and donations of free toothpaste and toothbrushes respectively.

Unfortunately, for the last one and half years we have not had any outreach events due to the Covid -19 situation. The risk for infection, coupled with the increased costs to carter for the extra personal protective equipment required are some of the challenges that compelled us to put the activities on hold. There is need to strategize on how we can carry on despite the pandemic which, it seems, may be here with us for much longer than we anticipated. Oral health is a key component of general health, and efforts towards primary health care in communities with limited or no access to dental services must not be delayed any longer if we are to sustain the gains that we have already made. Perhaps it is time to engage all the stakeholders in these discussions to allow for new policies on outreach activities and to seek out new partnerships that will support this course.

Greetings! I’m Sarah Borgida, Director of Children’s Programs and Tribal Partnerships at Arcora Foundation, which is funded by Delta Dental of Washington. Our mission is to bend the arc of oral health toward equity, and we do this in a variety of ways. We address public policy, work to achieve systems change, and award grants, mostly to safety net clinics in Washington state.  At Arcora, we partner with communities that experience oral health disparities and carry the burden of oral disease to eliminate disparities and eliminate oral disease (such as community clinics, refugees and immigrants, Native American tribes, and other community groups).  I’ve spent the last decade working in partnership with communities, patients, providers, organizations, and stakeholder groups to improve oral and overall health for people in Washington and the Northwest. My work is incredibly interesting, challenging, and rewarding (To be honest, it’s sometimes difficult to convince people I meet at cocktail parties that it’s interesting, but I do my best!).

I’m a former teacher, administrator, and have worked in education reform and to improve early learning systems and programs. So how did I get involved in oral health and spend ten years and counting doing this work? The story is long, but the reason is simple: I’m passionate about doing mission driven work, specifically social justice work, and oral health is a social justice and equity issue. Through my travels abroad, and my professional and personal experiences right here in Washington, I’ve seen how some people – particularly those with resources – have fantastic oral health and think very little about it, while others – often those with few resources – struggle to access even basic dental care and think about oral health constantly because they suffer with oral disease with no respite.

So, what is Arcora Foundation and I doing to end oral health disparities? As I mentioned above, all of the work we do at Arcora Foundation is in partnership with others – communities, providers, and organizations. We don’t do anything alone. One public-private partnership that I’m particularly proud of is Access to Baby and Child Dentistry (ABCD). This partnership includes Arcora Foundation, the University of Washington School of Dentistry, Washington’s Department of Health, and Health Care Authority (Medicaid Program), the Washington State Dental Association, and the Washington State Dental Hygiene Association. Together, this partnership supports the ABCD statewide system of care that connects Medicaid-insured children under 6 with dentists in their local communities who are ABCD trained and certified, and who receive enhanced fees for certain procedures. ABCD patients/families in need of extra help making and keeping dental appointments receive help from local ABCD coordinators. ABCD is nationally recognized and replicated and has been incredibly successful – over 54% of Washington’s Medicaid insured children under 6 accessed dental care in 2019, making ABCD a national leader in access for young Medicaid insured children.

Another partnership I’m honored to be a part of is one with Northwest Tribes, and the Northwest Tribal Dental Support Center. Together, we work to improve the oral health of Native people in the Northwest. We do this in a variety of ways, including through quality improvement collaboratives focused on young children 0 – 5 and with Native elders, and by providing grants and continuing education to tribal dental teams. The work we do together has also been nationally recognized and has been successful. For example, for Tribes that participated in the collaborative focused on young children, access to care increased 87% on average after the first year of program participation and 105% by the end of the program.

I am involved with a variety of other oral health improvement efforts at Arcora Foundation. One wise dentist said that in collaborative work, “everyone teaches, and everyone learns”. I truly believe that is what I’m doing at Arcora Foundation and with our partners, and while I hope I’m teaching something (I am a former teacher, after all!) I know have learned, and continue to learn, so much. I’m grateful to work with others every day to improve oral health, and overall health, and to end oral health disparities.

My name is Ailín Cabrera-Matta, I am a pediatric dentist with a PhD in Public Health. I currently work as an Associate Professor in the Department of Dentistry for Children and Adolescents at the Dental School, and as a researcher in the Epidemiology, STD and HIV Unit at the School of Public Health and Administration, both at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (UPCH) in Lima, Peru.

I received my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees from UPCH, where I also completed my pediatric dentistry residency. Although my training has been mainly in my home country, I have had the opportunity to visit and learn from American universities during different stages of my career. One of the most memorable of these international academic experiences was attending the 2014 Summer Institute on Clinical Dental Research Methods at University of Washington (UW) in Seattle. Not only did it help me to articulate my oral health knowledge and my recent—at that time— epidemiology training, but also allowed me to make a long-lasting friendship with a Thai colleague. At the end of that year, I was convinced of two things: I wanted to pursue a career in research, and I had to visit Thailand. I did both.

The following year, I was accepted to the Fogarty Fellowship Kuskaya: Interdisciplinary Training Program for Innovation in Global Health—developed and implemented by UPCH and the University of Washington (UW)—and also received the Pilot Award in Oral Health-HIV Research from the Ictus program at UW. These initiatives allowed me to have the resources I needed for my doctoral thesis project. As a Kuskaya fellow, I learned the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration to address global and public health issues and effectively implement change. It was also during this time, in 2015, that I met Dr. Patricia García and Dr. César Cárcamo, who from that moment became my mentors and have been a positive influence in my personal and professional life.

Another impactful experience is my time as an aide to the Peruvian Minister of Health between 2016 and 2017. As a result, I had the unprecedented and unique opportunity to work on the inclusion of oral health in the national regulation for check-ups in children younger than 5 years of age. I was very enthusiastic about having the chance to discuss this with non-dental health professionals in key positions within the public sector and learn about oral health policy and advocacy in the field.

Recently, the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) decided to fund my 2021-2022 GloCal Health Fellowship at the University of California Global Health Institute (UCGHI). My research will focus on identifying the potential barriers and strengths to developing a training program on infant oral health for nurses working with children during the first two years of life using mixed methods. I would like to contribute towards the development of public health strategies to address early childhood caries and promote infant oral health in resource-limited settings.

Hello, my name is Thao Do, and I am a Vice Dean, Faculty of Odonto-Stomatology, Can Tho University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Vietnam.

It was in February 2014 when I participated in a one-week training at the International Workshop on Clinical Research Methods in Oral Health in Quang Nam, Vietnam, where I was motivated by Prof. Timothy DeRouen and Dr. Ana Lucia Seminario whom encouraged me to achieve oral health research goals abroad. During this training experience, I had the pleasure of meeting Prof. Waranuch Pitiphat who gave me an opportunity to do training in research skills, where I became more confident and fell in love with scientific research.

Through generous support from NIH, I received an unprecedented opportunity to attend the 2014 Summer Institute on Clinical Dental Research Methods in Seattle. I continued learning in the areas of research project planning, clinical epidemiology, study design, clinical trials, surveys and measurement, biostatistics, ethics, and molecular biology. It was a great experience for me to improve my teamwork and presentation skills, and gain confidence interacting with other people in English. I enjoyed attending the research training institute, where I was able to learn different areas of scientific research and meet people differing dental specialties and cultures.

After finishing the Summer Institute training, I went to Khon Kaen University, Thailand for my Ph.D. program. With the knowledge and skills learned from the Summer Institute, I combined my love of scientific research with research communication and had the ability to work independently and improve my teamwork skills. This helped me a lot while writing my thesis, allowing me to finish the doctoral program and write my thesis within four years.

In 2018, I came back to my university and was appointed the Deputy Head of Scientific Research and International Cooperation. This was a great opportunity to be able to share my experience with my colleagues and to further develop the scientific research, article publications, and ethics committee at our university and motivate our school to join international research projects in Southeast Asia.

In addition, as a lecturer of the Faculty of Odonto-Stomatology, I conducted clinical research and mentoring of master’s students to develop the skills required for conducting research in oral health. Attending the Summer Institute help me improve my skills in teaching and writing, and I published a textbook about oral diseases for our students.

Currently, I have been appointed as Vice Dean of our faculty. I have been able to utilize scientific research skills and encourage students and colleagues to pursue additional research opportunities and help craft the school’s integrated approach to education and research. Recently, I joined an NIH project, that is a project training grant from UW/KKU for ASEAN countries. I expect that the program will significantly strengthen oral health research capacity in global oral health in Southeast Asia. In addition, I believe that my expertise gained during these valuable years has armed me with the necessary competency to participate and lead projects, particularly on the aspect of clinical research and oral health in Mekong Delta.

Hello, my name is Mink Lee, and I’m currently serving as an intern at the DeRouen Center for Global Oral Health at University of Washington. I work part-time as a registered dental hygienist and am also a graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in Public Health from California State University – Northridge (CSUN).

Why I chose public health

While in dental hygiene school, my rotations included dental screenings and presentations at public schools and convalescent homes for the underserved population. My desire grew to help make dental services available to everyone, especially those with limited resources. I started volunteering at a community children’s dental clinic and participated in public health fairs providing dental screenings and preventative oral health instructions to at-risk populations. I realized many who live below the poverty line don’t have access to dental care and were not aware of products that could help treat conditions like dry mouth or nearby dental services available to them. My focus in my master’s program is on community health education. I wish to empower those who live in underserved communities to know what resources are available and have a better quality of life.

Joining the DeRouen Center

After volunteering at public health settings for the past ten years, I was excited to intern at the DeRouen Center. I’ve had the opportunity to meet and work with great people at the Center and with oral health educators and researchers in Kenya. I look forward to learning more about the Center’s dental health and research initiatives locally in Seattle and abroad.

Greetings, my name is Dr. Patrick Rooney, and I am a graduate of the University of Washington School of Dentistry. My first clinical experience with Public Health Dentistry was a summer session between my 3rd and 4th year of dental school, when I was fortunate to participate in the collaboration with the Yakima Valley Migrant Farm Worker Health Care Clinics in Yakima and Toppenish, in rural Eastern Washington. That singular formative experience with a most needy population was when I realized the end result of the trials and rigors of our dental education would lead to me as a professional passion.

After graduation, my exposure to the dire realities of untreated and rampant tooth decay in our backyard communities helped me shape the eventual model of practice.  These strong feelings of professional direction and focus were enhanced yet further with my first two jobs as a dentist. I was the first and only full-time staff dentist at the Interfaith Community Health Center, then a two-chair clinic in Bellingham, Washington, and helped with its growth to 4 chairs.  Young children and teenagers were our focus, and rampant dental caries the norm.   A second valuable experience was a job for several months as staff dentist at the Lummi Nation Tribal Health Center, also in Bellingham.  The pattern continued there…rampant 4 quads of untreated tooth decay.  And so, by 2 years of good clinical experience with rampant oral disease I had the vision of the reality of the community I had loved since my childhood, and a model of the private practice I would open and run for over the next 20+ years.  My focus was on access as a “safety net provider” to the neediest among us…low income children with the highest rates of untreated rampant decay.

Since my retirement from the full-time practice of dentistry, I have continued to stay involved with my chosen profession through volunteer opportunities. For example, I have been fortunate to join overseas humanitarian  missions with the U.S. Navy aboard its 2 Navy Hospital Ships as a civilian dentist…USNS Mercy in the Philippines in 2016, and USNS Comfort with two similar missions to the Southern Hemisphere for 5 months over 2018 and 2019. Countries including Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Colombia, Honduras, and several island nations of the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela.  In addition to the daily clinical treatment of the great number of wonderful, grateful and needy populations  at each stop, we also collaborated with each country’s Ministries of Health, with referrals to local sources for follow up care of the most complicated cases, held symposiums with local health care providers on topics of procedures, materials, and demonstrations to local dentists on how/ we do what we do, and along with hands on clinical healthcare, teams of Navy Seabees built roads, school buildings, water projects, fences for livestock, and more, in the hot and humid jungle environments  of our destinations.  All hands returned to the ship each evening ready for a quick meal, department meeting, maybe some Peloton or weight room  workout, shower, and fall into a Navy rack fully exhausted but with a smile of memories of the full day just completed, a sound sleep, and awake at 4:45 am to do it all again the next day!  900+ people ALL on the same page. In addition to active duty Navy medical personnel, we were joined by officers and enlisted personnel with the U.S. Public Health Service which also included several days on board with us by the Surgeon General of the United States.

Finally, yet one more exhilarating experience as a volunteer in the Public Health arena has been my wonderful experience closer to home with the Seattle King County Clinic for 4 days each in 2018, 2019, and 2020.  These clinics have been held at Seattle Center for several years now, and I look forward to the day we can continue this outreach to so many in our own backyard here in the Pacific Northwest.  I applaud the focus and efforts of the UW School of Dentistry and the DeRouen Center for Global Oral Health, for the high level of training and social awareness to ever more generations of young dedicated healthcare providers known as DENTISTS!!!

My name is Jennifer N. Ricaldi-Camahuali, faculty in the Department of Social Dentistry at Cayetano Heredia Peruvian University (UPCH) in Peru. I have a specialty in Pediatric Dentistry and training in Clinical Epidemiology, and five years ago I came to Seattle and received a Master of Public Health in Global Health at the University of Washington (UW).

In the last ten years as faculty in the department of Social Dentistry, I shared my experiences and knowledge gathered from training at UPCH (Peru), an internship at the Bebé-Clínica (Brazil), and a novel perspective about Global health learned at UW. My goals are to motivate, train and teach dental students about Public Health and Global Health, and bring awareness of the importance and necessity of improving oral health of the most vulnerable population.

My experience as a trainer in Colombia and coordinator in Peru of a Pan-American Health Organization project (SOFAR, Salud Oral Factores de Riesgo) increased my understanding of the necessity to integrate oral health within general health.

It was in May 2014 when I participated in the First Latin American Workshop on Clinical Research Methods in Oral Health, organized by UW in Peru, where I was motivated by Dr. Jorge Luis Castillo and Dr. Ana Lucia Seminario. Both, alumni, and faculty members from UPCH, encouraged me to achieve oral health research goals abroad. During this training experience, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Tim DeRouen, who was director of the Center for Global Oral Health, and he became a mentor. His vision in expanding global oral health research was inspiring. After coming to Seattle in 2016 for the 25th Summer Institute in Clinical Dental Research Methods, I was accepted into the program of Master of Public Health in Global Health at UW in 2018.

During my first year as a student in the MPH program in Global Health, I volunteered in the Timothy A. DeRouen Center for Global Oral Health, collaborating in the organization of the symposium “Inter-professional Collaboration in Healthcare: Adding the Oral Health Component to Successful Projects Worldwide,” and co-coordinating the second collection of data in the oral health project in the Peruvian Amazon- InterACTION Labs Project in Claverito (Iquitos). These opportunities further contributed to my training, learning closely from the experience of experts and peers in the oral health area.

Since my last year during the MPH program when the COVID-19 pandemic spread worldwide, my interest in health policies, implementation science, and science communication areas increased, adding some additional steps to my journey. Currently, these subjects are key factors to ensure the protection and access to health care and conditions to reduce the impact of oral diseases during and after the pandemic.

Seems like this journey has not ended but has allowed me to learn from experiences from all around the world. I have received knowledge and guidance in understanding the importance of strengthening oral health services, especially in the most vulnerable populations. I’m convinced that the improvement in communication and collaborative work will promote equal and quality oral health care worldwide.