Reps: Licensing dental therapists could boost access to care
A hearing has been scheduled for as early as this week for a sunrise application that some representatives believe could improve access to dental care for rural areas such as Yuma.
At the beginning of September, Dental Care of Arizona filed a “sunrise” application with the Arizona Legislature for the licensure of dental therapists.
According to the Council on Licensure, Enforcement & Regulation (www.clearhq.org), “Sunrise is a process under which an occupation or profession wishing to receive state certification or licensure must propose the components of the legislation, along with cost and benefit estimates of the proposed regulation. The profession must then convince the legislators that consumers will be unduly harmed if the proposed legislation is not adopted.”
The Dental Care for AZ website stated that the coalition is a group of organizations “united in support of a proposal before the state Legislature that would authorize use of dental therapists in Arizona, eliminate unnecessary government regulation of the dental delivery system and increase access to dental care for vulnerable populations.”
The website said dental therapists are similar to physician assistants or nurse practitioners on medical teams. Dental therapists receive training in routine restorative procedures, such as filling cavities and performing extractions.
Often, dental therapists work away from the traditional dental office in locations such as rural clinics, nursing homes and schools while keeping in touch with supervising dentists through telehealth technology, the website stated.
“Representing a highly rural area, I know the need for dentists in our area as being great,” said Charlene Fernandez, House Minority Whip, who represents part of Yuma and the south county communities in Legislative District 4. “I work closely with a lot of our clinics — Sunset Clinic and Regional Center for Border Health — and one area where they lack in medical services is dental. A lot of it is because they can’t get dentists out to the rural areas, so my feeling is that dental therapists could fill that need.”
The coalition’s press release states more than 2.4 million Arizonans currently lack access to sufficient dental health providers, and live in dental health professional shortage areas, which are defined as one dentist for 5,000 or more people.
“This (application) is something they are bringing forward to allow more access,” said state District 13 Sen. Steve Montenegro.
Dental Care for AZ lists portions of all 15 counties in Arizona as designated shortage areas, including all of Yuma, Graham, Greenlee, La Paz and Santa Cruz counties based off the professional shortage definition and data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration, Bureau of Health Workforce, 2016’s “Designated Health Professional Shortage Area Statistics.”
Research from the coalition showed in 2014 there were nearly 27,000 visits to the emergency department for dental conditions which could have been avoided with “routine dental care.”
This will be the second time the legalization of licensed dental therapists has been proposed. However, last year the application was voted down by a legislative review committee.
Fernandez said she felt this occurred, in part, because “a further step” was needed to demonstrate the dental care access need in rural communities.
“I do think that for a lot of our legislators that come from Maricopa County or from Yuma County, those are the individuals we need to talk to about what’s happening outside those metropolitan areas,” she stated.
In the past, the application has faced opposition from the Arizona Dental Association, which expressed concerns that the licensing of dental therapists would not necessarily be a solution to barriers to dental care access.
The hearing on the sunrise application for the licensure of dental therapists has been scheduled for Tuesday at the Capitol.
To read the sunrise application, visit www.azda.org/docs/ default-source/important-documents/dental-care-for-az-sunriseapplication2017.pdf?sfvrsn=2