Student dental clinic helps those with no insurance
A team of dental students at the University of Saskatchewan has set up a clinic in Saskatoon to help those who don’t have the finances to get proper dental care.
The new DIRECT Dental clinic, run out of the College of Dentistry’s Saskatoon West Dental Clinic facility, will offer dental services to people who are “uninsured and can’t otherwise afford it,” according to a news release from the University of Saskatchewan.
The news release also stated that treatments will be offered at “no cost” if certain conditions are met.
Darren Vinek, who was waiting outside the clinic doors on Saturday
morning before it opened, said it was “huge” to have these kinds of services offered to the people of Saskatoon.
“I’m running on a tight budget, and I need to get some work done,” he said.
“For the cost of dental, I was thinking about going out of the country to get things looked at.”
Vinek said he hadn’t had a professional teeth cleaning or any dental work done since 2014, when he still worked for the government and had his dental work covered by insurance.
He said going to the new clinic would save him hundreds of dollars, and possibly more if he ended up requiring more dental work that he didn’t know about yet.
The clinic’s official opening was attended by dozens of dental students there to volunteer, dressed in specially branded scrubs. The clinic founders — dental students Christopher Bertsch, Kristen Kezar, Christy Macpherson and Mary Tait — cut a purple ribbon at the front doors to signify the opening of the clinic.
There was plenty of ingenuity on display on the blustery Saturday morning, and not just the affordable dental clinic that students made a reality. Macpherson was
I’m running on a tight budget, and I need to get some work done. For the cost of dental, I was thinking about going out of the country to get things looked at.
out with a couple of volunteers to tie down celebratory balloons to the railings outside with rolls of dental floss to make sure they didn’t blow away.
The clinic is scheduled to be open on select Saturdays from noon until 4 p.m. Macpherson said there was “100 per cent participation” from the student body in terms of volunteering.
“For us, this is a great opportunity to get out, to meet people we otherwise wouldn’t see ... and do some work and feel really good about it,” she said.
Macpherson said they would do their best to accommodate every person who came to the clinic on a “first-come, first-served” basis, and emergency situations would take precedence.
For people who will be using the clinic, such as Darren Vinek, having this open downtown has the potential to make a big impact.
“It sounds pretty good ... you can’t beat no cost associated with it,” Vinek said.