The Greater Boston Area
The first public dental program in the United States began in Boston in 1916. Today, there are 17 community health centers in the greater Boston area, which have operated in the city for more than 30 years providing oral health services. The centers have over 100,000 patient visits per year. Approximately 130 dental personnel offer a full range of care to all ages except for complex hospital-based services. Each of the centers has affiliations with one or more of the three Boston dental schools.
The Joseph M. Smith Community Health Center
offers health care to the Allston-Brighton communities, a designated health professions shortage area. It has extended its services to the community of Waltham. The patient population represents 23 countries and speaks 19 languages. Area residents come from Central and South America, Southeast Asia, Ireland, Russia, China, and Haiti. For over 25 years, the health center, which is assessed by the Federal Bureau of Primary Health Care, Primary Care Effectiveness Review, has provided comprehensive primary health care including medical, dental, optometric, podiatric, gynecological, and social and counseling services. A team of nurse-midwives delivers about 100 babies each year as part of an active prenatal program. It maintains affiliations with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Children’s Hospital, and Mount Auburn Hospital. The dental service has six full-time dentists and two specialists, a pediatric dentist, and a prosthodontist at its two locations. The range of oral health care is comprehensive.
Dorchester House Multi-Service Center is a full-service, state-of-the-art community health center offering primary and specialty medical services to people of all ages. The center, accredited by JCAHO, has extensive programs in women’s health, ophthalmology, behavioral health, family services, public health, and youth and recreation services. The Dental Services Department at Dorchester House offers a broad array of general dentistry and specialty services. Oral health care is comprehensive; in addition to general dentistry it includes periodontics, oral and maxillofacial surgery, endodontics, prosthodontics, and oral medicine. Twenty-one general dentists and specialists provide care and many have at least one year of advanced training or multiple postdoctoral degrees. Most of the senior staff teach at Boston University, and maintain close and active relationships with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. The newly renovated clinic has 11 operatories and is bright, cheerful, and equipped with state-of-the-art dental technology. For example, the endodontic practice has an operating microscope, and endodontic residents from Boston University participate in the dental program.
Since 1965, Harvard Street Neighborhood Health Center provides comprehensive health care in several sites to families of the North Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roxbury communities of Boston, a Federally designated Empowerment Zone. This mission drives the health center: that people can best improve the quality of health and life by developing goals of self-health, by being a producer of health rather than a consumer of it, and by being dedicated participants in health education and preventive medicine. The health center, assessed by the Federal Bureau of Primary Health Care, Primary Care Effectiveness Review offers adult medicine, ophthalmology, pediatrics, dermatology, OB/GYN, and a range of social services, including life centers for children, adolescents, and Black men. The patient population is primarily black-African American, African, Haitian, West Indian, and Cape Verdean. The Department of Dentistry’s goal of “Healthy Teeth, Healthy Gums, and Healthy Smiles” underlies Harvard Street’s vision of “Healthy Body, Healthy Mind, Healthy Community.” Dental residents will see pediatric, juvenile, adult, geriatric, and medically compromised patients from two to more than 80 years of age. They will take part in triaging and providing treatment to emergency patients as time allows. Case selection and treatment planning will be evaluated daily to sensitize residents to the philosophy of care of a culturally and linguistically competent team. The seven-operatory dental service is fully equipped for fourhanded dentistry. Three full-time and one part-time dental assistants, one full-time dental hygienist, and one or two full-time receptionists support the staff dentists. Dental services are comprehensive.
The Codman Square Health Center begun by the instigation of a group of neighborhood activists, opened in a library basement in 1979. Since then, this community-based, ambulatory care, and multi-service health center has moved into a state-of-the-art facility and has expanded its services to include a full range of primary care, eye care, and urgent care, in addition to behavioral health and social, educational, youth, and community services. Today, most of the 250 employees of this JCAHO-accredited health center reside in surrounding neighborhoods and record over 120,000 client contacts and 80,000 clinical visits annually. The staff is multi-lingual and multi-cultural with fluency in Haitian Creole, Spanish, and French, among other languages. The dental staff includes three full-time dentists, a full-time hygienist, and dental residents and students from nearby colleges and universities. Specialty services include periodontics, oral and maxillofacial surgery, and prosthodontics. There are seven modern fully-equipped operatories. The staff provides comprehensive oral health care to adults and children. Our dental prevention and outreach efforts extend to local schools within our surrounding neighborhood.
Whittier Street Health Center, accredited by JCAHO, is a private, not-for-profit health center incorporated in 1974. Begun in 1938 as a well-baby clinic, today Whittier has 6,300 registered patients and takes pride in the strength of its community support. It provides a full range of adult, family, and adolescent medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, men’s health, and social and other outreach services to a culturally diverse population. The health center is a designated refugee health assessment site and has seen a recent influx of patients from Somalia and West Africa. Whittier has three full-time general dentists, one part-time orthodontist, one full-time dental hygienist, three full-time dental assistants, and one part-time assistant. It has an excellent six-chair facility and offers comprehensive dental care including oral surgery and orthodontics.
The Dimock Community Health Center Complex opened as the New England Hospital for Women and Children in 1862 to meet women’s medical needs, and to train female nurses and doctors in the practice of medicine. Dimock Community Health Center, accredited by JCAHO, is located on a nine-acre campus that has National Historic Landmark status with 15 off-site locations serving the inner city neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain. The center provides vital services to over 40,000 families each year including adult medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, ophthalmology, podiatry, orthopedics, and diabetes and HIV care. The dental team includes a full-time pediatric dentist, two full-time general dentists, a part-time general dentist, and three dental assistants who work in an excellent, modern facility and provide a wide range of general dentistry. Dental and dental hygiene students from nearby colleges rotate through the site.
South Cove Community Health Center
South Cove Community Health Center, established in 1972 by a group of volunteers, has responded to the health care needs of the local residents in Boston’s Chinatown. The needs of residents began to change in the 1960s when modified immigration laws triggered an influx of new immigrants to urban America and in Boston’s Chinatown, a transition from a mostly bachelor worker society to a family-based community. Today, more than 30 years later, South Cove is accredited by JCAHO and focuses on the medically underserved. It has several sites located in the greater Boston area with over 170 employees, serving approximately 19,000 patients annually. South Cove is affiliated with Beth Israel Deaconess and Children’s Hospitals. New challenges include meeting the needs of increasingly diverse nearby Asian communities. The staff speaks Chinese (Cantonese, Mandarin, Toisanese, Taiwanese), Vietnamese, and Khmer. South Cove offers adult medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, optometry, podiatry, acupuncture, and mental and community health programs. The center sponsors Vietnamese and Khmer family and youth programs at two of its sites.
Dental residents rotate between the South Street Center and the North Quincy Center spending three and two days respectively at each site. Both sites are convenient to the Boston “T,” the subway system. The sites have three full-time general dentists and they share a team of four part-time dentists and five dental assistants. There are five modern operatories at the South Street Center and three at North Quincy. The dental staff provides a wide range of oral health care and refers patients for orthodontic services. About 60 percent of the patients are adults and 40 percent children. Dental and medical services are well integrated and residents have substantial experience with geriatric and medically complex patients. Residents who are able to speak one of the dialects or languages common to the South Cove complex of health centers are highly desirable.
Western Massachusetts
The Holyoke Health Center has been providing medical and dental care in the poorest community in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts since 1970. The JCAHO-accredited health center completed a $20 million renovation in 2006 and is now housed in a state-of-the-art facility in the heart of downtown. Each year 16,000 patients receive care at the health center, including more than 8,000 of whom come for dental care. The dental Director holds adjunct faculty positions in the dental schools of Harvard, Tufts, and Boston Universities. He and his internationally-trained team of dentists provide care in eleven operatories, which are equipped with the latest technology, including rotary endodontics, digital radiography, a digital Panorex, and intra-oral digital camera. A visiting oral surgeon and a periodontist provide the only oral surgery and periodontic services available to the uninsured in all of Western Massachusetts. Medical and dental care are well-integrated at the Holyoke Health Center, and residents will have the opportunity to work with patients whose chronic illnesses, including diabetes and HIV/AIDS, make them particularly vulnerable to poor oral health. Holyoke Health Center offers the opportunity to provide medical care in the poorest city in the state to the neediest people in the state while living in one of the most desirable areas in the country.
Historic Massachusetts and Cosmopolitan Boston
The history of Massachusetts dates back 3,000 years. By the time the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, 70 percent of the tribes of the Algonquin Nation had died from diseases brought by early explorers and European fishermen. Pilgrims established the first permanent settlement in Plymouth seeking religious freedom rather than the scarce natural resources of the region. They created a democratic form of government under the terms of The Mayflower Compact. The Puritans followed a few years later settling in Salem and bringing with them the royal charter formalizing the Massachusetts Bay Company. Thus began the evolution of American democracy. Massachusetts’ residents began to resist restrictions imposed by the British Crown about 1660. The Massachusetts Bay Colony lost its charter in 1684 and became a Royal Province in 1691. In less than 100 years, the people of Massachusetts approved the oldest written Constitution in the world still in effect and their relentless resistance to royal repression triggered the Revolutionary War with the shots fired in Lexington and Concord. After the war, manufacturing, especially textiles and leather goods, replaced farming, whaling, and maritime trade as the major industry in the Commonwealth. A period of potent intellectualism and social activism during the early 19th century produced the abolitionist movement and the start of the Underground Railway. Massachusetts continued to prosper through economic downturns, waves of immigration, and the impact of several wars. Today the Commonwealth hosts more than eighty universities, centers of technology and research, and a re-emerging international trade movement.
Puritans founded Boston in 1630, and the rich sources of cod in local waters nurtured the maritime trade, especially to plantations in the West Indies. Boston prospered and became the largest city in the British colonies until replaced by Philadelphia in the mid-eighteenth century. After the Revolutionary War, Boston’s prosperity continued primarily through shipping, shipbuilding, banking, and manufacturing. Trading in the Far East brought luxury goods to the city and its pragmatic business sensibility and budding aristocracy instilled a tradition of wealth, culture, intellectualism, and education that persists to today.
There are fifty colleges and universities and an estimated 700 high-tech companies in Boston. The city treasures and preserves its historical heritage but pursues urban redevelopment in order to maintain its place as a major commercial center. Boston, a centerpiece of American history, is also a major center of health care, higher education, music, theater, art, and spectator sports. For sports fans, the city hosts the Celtics, Bruins, Red Sox, and Patriots. From stately Old North Church to venerable Fenway Park, from the picturesque Commons to the USS Constitution, Boston has something to offer everyone.
Surrounded by the lush beauty of the Connecticut River Valley, Holyoke is an industrial city in western Massachusetts with a population of 40,000, over half of whom are Latino. Vollyeyball was invented at a local YMCA in 1895. The Dinosaur Footprints Park is nearby. Holyoke is an “inner city” surrounded by towns that offer affordable, high-quality housing; excellent public schools; a wide variety of daycare and preschools for younger children; recreational activities in the arts, theater, sports, and the outdoors; and career opportunities for spouses and partners. Northampton-just twenty minutes from Holyoke-was included in Money Magazine/CNN’s list of “100 Best Places to Live 2005.” Longmeadow-just fifteen minutes from Holyoke-was a “contender” in the list. Amherst-30 minutes away-is a diverse, inclusive community and host to Amherst College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The Springfield Symphony, UMASS Fine Arts Center, and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival are a small sample of the cultural opportunities available in the area. For sports enthusiasts, ski resorts, golf courses, and excellent hiking are easily accessible.
Massachusetts
Luisa Recio-Salcedo, DMD, MMSc
AEGD Assistant Program Director
617.534.4717
© 2006 Lutheran Medical Center Department of Dental Medicine
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