Healing California offers services
Dental, vision care made available at no cost to low-income, homeless populations in state
The goal is daunting, for the need is vast: delivering free dental and vision care to California’s low-income and homeless populations. Each tooth extraction, each prescription for eyewear and each referral for medical treatment bring them closer to solving pernicious problems in the statewide crisis. It’s a crisis some view as an ultramarathon they see as a sprint.
“We’re not even near fixing the 10% of people that need specifically dental and vision care that cannot get it at all,” said Linwood Boomer, creator of TV show “Malcolm in the Middle” who in 2018 founded Healing California. “We’re really trying to floor it, put our foot on the gas pedal and just growing to serve this need in the population that needs it.”
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Point-In-Time Estimates of Homelessness, conducted each January, estimates the state’s overall homeless population at 161,548. A decade ago, homelessness in California stood at 125,128 people.
According to the California Budget and Policy Center, each year from 2016 to 2018, 7.1 million Californians were living in poverty — over 1 in 6 res
idents. Recent data from the Census Bureau shows the number of uninsured Californians reached 7.2% in 2018 — far from the double-digit figures seen after the Great Recession — though stubbornly unchanged from 2017.
With the efficiency of a MASH unit, Healing arrives on-site for a day, often several, supplied with the essential equipment and tools needed by dentists and optometrists to treat hundreds of patients. Health care workers and their assistants are recruited from the area in advance.
In 2018, the nascent organization provided an estimated $715,000 worth of medical, dental and vision services at 10 clinics statewide to 1,760 patients. In 2019, volunteers with Healing performed about $916,000 in services treating 2,557 patients at 15 clinics from Redding to San Diego.
The sprintlike pace is required to meet the mountain of basic medical needs of California’s most vulnerable populations, including homeless veterans.
In the past two decades, a growing body of research identified a problematic trend in emergency room visits. In 2017 alone, the American Dental Association Health Policy Institute found that over 2 million people visited the ER with avoidable dental conditions. Toothache was chief among the most common complaints attributed to poor oral health.
“Not only is it tying up really valuable resources in the hospital system, doctors within the ER are not dental specialists. They often don’t know what they’re looking at,” said Tom Burley, Healing’s program director. “And often all that’s happening is they’re going away with a prescription for antibiotics which will quell the infection right then, but if there’s that underlying decay, and there’s that underlying disease, it’s just going to come back.”
During a clinic or stand-down event, which provides medical and other services to homeless vets, volunteer dentists and optometrists take a patient’s medical history before administering a battery of tests, checking for gum disease, cataracts and signs of glaucoma and diabetes.
Minus serious findings via X-ray, said James Chen, a Fresno public health dentist, “We would do a cleaning for them. If they need a filling, we’ll do that for them. If they need any teeth removed, we’ll do that.”
Prescriptions for eyeglasses are written up and mailed to patients or a homeless agency within a week or two, said Greg Pearl, an optometrist with offices in Norwalk, Lakewood and El Centro. He and Chen serve on Healing’s board. Patients requiring more invasive procedures like cataract surgery or a root canal are referred to a local professional or public hospital. Veterans are referred to the Veterans Affairs system.
Unlike the VA, Healing treats veterans regardless of their discharge classification.
Similar nonprofits exist treating low-income and homeless population’s dental or vision or medical needs. Few, however, deliver those services, year after year, beyond metropolitan areas and mass clinic sites to rural communities, Boomer said. The key to assuaging this gaping hole is accessibility.
When the pandemic picked up steam in March 2020, Healing went into a brief hiatus. It stocked up on personal protective equipment, canceled months of events and monitored the spread of COVID-19. It also invested in a dental office on wheels to reach patients in remote pockets of the state.
Healing resumed services in August, albeit modified to CDC and state guidelines. Yet despite the constraints posed by COVID-19 and its variants, Healing’s pace remains at a sprint. “The work still needs to be done,” Chen said.
“There’s still people out there who need to be helped.”