| Homeless people with dental problems have one less place to get help now that a non-profit organization that offered free care has had to suspend operations due to a lack of funding.
The Calgary Mutual Aid Society For Mental Health started offering free dental care to homeless people in January 2004, and has helped 285 people. However, executive director Steve Gates says his organization hasn’t been able to offer the service since August because it has exhausted all sources of funding.
"Most of them are basically in agony and they need to get to a dentist asap," he says of the clients his organization has helped.
Gates says he knows that the dental program his society runs has made a big difference in the lives of many people. He gives the example of a man in his mid-20s who needed dentures.
"What teeth he had left were rotten and he was only about 24 or 25," says Gates. "He couldn’t even eat his Christmas dinner because his mouth was so sore."
With the help of the society, the man had his remaining teeth extracted and was fitted for a pair of dentures.
"The neat thing is within the week he got a job as a truck driver," says Gates.
Homeless people are able to get free dental care at a Calgary Health Region dental clinic and they can go to Calgary Urban Project Society (CUPS) for free basic emergency dental care.
Luke Shwart, manager of community oral health with the Calgary Health Region (CHR), says the CHR has three dental clinics in Calgary and one in Airdrie that offer services to homeless and low-income people. However, Shwart says the CHR is unable to meet demand for dental services.
"We’re just so overwhelmed by people who need care," says Shwart. "There’s a lot of need for dental care in our community."
CHR dental clinics stopped keeping a waiting list because, he says, "When we had one it just so quickly ballooned up into the hundreds that it was pointless to start promising people that we were going to call them because it just wasn’t working. People could easily wait months."
He says the dental clinics try to give priority to people who need emergency dental care, but even then people can wait more than 48 hours for care.
"The City of Calgary is close to a million people now and in my clinics I can offer maybe up to 5,000 appointments a year, so even if every one of those is for a different person, that would be only 5,000 in one year in a city of a million. It just doesn’t quite compute," says Shwart.
Gates says he’s been seeking funding from every source he can think of, but so far his society is out of luck and is having to refer people to the CHR clinics, which can’t meet demand. |
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