IOWA CITY, IA (October 9, 2019) — The little boy had never heard of the tooth fairy, so Kelsey Edwards thought she'd fill him in.
"The boy was Amish," says Edwards, a second-year dental student in the UI College of Dentistry who had helped pull a tooth that needed extracting. "I held it up to him, but he'd never heard of the tooth fairy. I told him the story about when I was a little girl and I'd leave a note to the tooth fairy on the kitchen table and hope for a quarter in the morning."
Edwards helped treat the boy while participating in the Iowa Mission of Mercy (IMOM) dental clinic in Davenport September 21. IMOM is an annual free dental-clinic where dental professionals volunteer their time to provide free oral health-care to people who cannot otherwise afford it or who don't have dental insurance.
About 200 students and faculty from the College of Dentistry — a group that included James Park of Bettendorf, IA 52722 — spent the day in Davenport providing free care to anyone who needed it, including many Amish families like the boy's.
UI co-sponsors the clinic each year and has sent teams of volunteers to every one that's been held since 2008, providing more than 14,000 patients with dental-care worth more than $9.4 million. The two-day clinic overseen by the Iowa Dental Association rotates around the state each year and UI volunteers work at each, including recent clinics in Dubuque, Waterloo, Sioux City, Cedar Rapids, and Council Bluffs.
The UI contingent was by far the largest of the many private practitioners that filled Davenport's sprawling RiverCenter convention hall on the second day of the clinic. The room might have appeared chaotic, but the many parts came together like a well-oiled machine, as hundreds of people waited patiently for services from hundreds more dentists, hygienists, assistants, and students waiting at rows of dental chairs.
Carrie McKnight, a College of Dentistry faculty member who's participated in five IMOM clinics and now organizes the college's participation, says the setting is an important part of the learning experience for the students. It requires them to focus on their patients amid the distractions, while treating oral health-issues many of them haven't seen before.
"It's a way for the students to get a lot of experience that they can't get in the college's clinic, and they love it," says McKnight, assistant clinical professor, noting that for many, it's the first chance ever to actually work in a patient's mouth. "They learn through activities like this that outreach is part of what we do as dentists."
To read the full story and learn more about the UI College of Dentistry, click HERE.
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