Smile Healthy - Improving Dental Access and Oral Health in Champaign County

"Smile Healthy!" Project Targets Dental Care Access and Oral Health

Thursday, October 31, 2002

WILL-AM 580, WBCP-AM 1580, and Champaign County Health Care Consumers have won national grants totaling $32,500 to launch a comprehensive, community-based campaign, Smile Healthy!, aimed at improving oral health and access to dental care in Champaign County.

WILL-AM is one of 36 public radio and television stations selected nationally to forge alliances between community health care organizations and public broadcasting, said Kimberlie Kranich, outreach coordinator at WILL AM-FM-TV. “We’re excited that WBCP and Champaign County Health Care Consumers are joining us in an effort to address the critical need for affordable dental care in our community.”

The grant funds from Sound Partners for Community Health, a national project of the Benton Foundation funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, will be used to report on the dental care access problem and to encourage citizen action in the community to improve the situation. Smile Healthy! project partners have called a community meeting to gather information about problems with access to dental care and oral health at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 12, at the TLC Center, 508 N. Neil St.

“We hope anyone who has had a problem with access to dental care or anyone who knows about this need in our community will come and tell about it,” said Claudia Lennhoff, executive director of Champaign County Health Care Consumers.

Lennhoff said that her organization has seen a shift in the types of health care problems prompting people to call the Health Care Consumers hotline. “Over the last three years, we’ve definitely seen more and more calls about dental access problems. People are saying, ‘ I can’t afford dental care. I have a broken molar.’ Or ‘I have an infection.’ ‘I need dentures.’ Or ‘My child needs dental care,’ ” she said. More than half of the 100 or so calls a month to the hotline are about access to dental care, she said.

“In some ways, oral health problems are like cancer; they are destined to get worse without treatment,” Lennhoff said. “We have people who come to us with horrible raging infections, unable to eat, who have to keep going to the emergency room to manage their dental problems.”

Only one clinic in Champaign-Urbana will accept Medicaid patients, and it has a waiting list of more than 800 people, she said. A dental referral program run by CCHCC enrolls patients who can afford to pay on a sliding scale, but many people cannot afford the lowest price of 40 percent of the dentist’s usual fees.

WILL-AM and WBCP-AM will produce a series of radio reports, live call-in programs, and a 30-minute documentary about the outcome of the community effort to solve the dental access problem.

The project Web site, www.smilehealthy.org, will feature radio reports, information about dental care resources, a discussion board, notices of community events, and forms for people to volunteer to help with efforts to improve dental care access.