Dental students get incentive to work in underserved areas
OSU program offers $40K for students to fill dental care need.
Brandi Lantz already planned to return home to southeastern Ohio to practice dentistry, but now Ohio State University’s College of Dentistry has provided an incentive. The school awarded her a four-year scholarship worth $40,000 — provided she works in an area underserved by dentists after she graduates.
Lantz is among eight firstyear dental students who have been chosen from among 23 applicants for the first year of the CARE (Commitment to Access, Resources and Education) program.
Dentistry college Dean Patrick Lloyd plans to add up to 10 first-year students per year to participate in the program through their four years in dental school. With tuition costing $47,000 a year, the $10,000 annual scholarship is significant.
“It’s really important,” said Lantz, 27, who is from Coolville in Athens County and plans to return to the area to practice. “You may not be making as much money, and it could help in paying back student loans.”
Lantz, whose husband, Joseph Lantz, 30, is finishing medical school at Ohio University and plans to practice emergency medicine, said she always has known that she would practice dentistry in Athens County or nearby. She said she likes and understands the communities in the region and the challenges.
“I understand that there are certain disparities, including in income or in geographic isolation, and that there’s a lack of dental providers in the area,” she said. “I understand and sympathize because I grew up there.”
Appalachian counties in the eastern, southeastern and southern parts of Ohio all are federally designated dental professional shortage areas.
The CARE program is designed to recruit dental students from those areas and to help them improve access to dental care by getting them to practice in the areas after they graduate.
“I believe that Ohioans should have access to the same level of educated oral health care practitioners no matter where they live or what their economic status is,” Lloyd said.
Dental care is important. It has been well documented that children without it miss more days of school because of toothaches and pain, Lloyd said. Adults with rotted or missing teeth can have trouble getting jobs, and they may also face health complications including infections, he said.
The Ohio State program emerged as part of a $95 million dental school expansion, including $26 million in state capital budget funding. The project will add 132,000 square feet of classroom and clinic space when it’s completed in the spring of 2020, including enough space to increase yearly class size from 110 to 120 students, the dean said.
The extra 10 students will be in the CARE program. In addition to taking the regular dental school curriculum, participants must agree to additional training including monthly meetings with public health professionals and others to discuss issues that patients in underserved areas face. Those may include lack of transportation and lack of insurance.
Participating students also must maintain a 3.4 grade point average and must be mentored by a dentist from their underserved area while they are in school.
“We believe that offering this incentive would reduce their debt burden, making it more possible that they could afford to practice in an underserved community where their earning potential might not be as high as in another community,” Lloyd said.
Elisha Strahler, who is 22 and from Waterford in Washington County, said he also plans to practice in southeastern Ohio. Like Lantz, he has undergraduate loans and dental school loans, and he looks forward to the scholarship money.
“This will be $40,000 you’ll get to knock off debt,” he said.