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Lutheran Medical Center and Lutheran Family Health Centers
Today, the Lutheran Medical Center has 476 beds and employs 600 physicians and dentists. In addition to dentistry, Lutheran sponsors fully accredited programs to 150 residents in family medicine, general surgery, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, and podiatry, as well as an osteopathic rotating internship. It maintains numerous major affiliations such as the Mount Sinai Health System, New York’s largest regional health care association; State University of New York Health Science Center at Brooklyn; and the Healthcare Association of New York State. The Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) accredits Lutheran Medical Center.
Nine health centers comprise the Lutheran Family Health Centers, which include fourteen dental operatories at Sunset Park
, the main site, which serves nearly 27,000 dental patients, providing over 60,000 visits for general dentistry and specialty care. In addition, there are two operatories at Park Slope Family Health Center, five at Park Ridge, three at Brooklyn Chinese Health Center, and five at the Caribbean American Family Health Center. Sunset Park offers a comprehensive range of family-oriented dental care and four dental anesthesiologists facilitate treatment for selected patients under conscious sedation. Candidates for such care include children with extensive dental needs, children and adults who are fearful of dental treatment, and referrals from community agencies for special care patients. In conjunction with the Network’s School Health Program dental staff and residents visit the schools to identify children with oral health needs. The Sunset Park center offers treatment in English, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese. The Park Slope center, which opened in 1990, offers health care based on a private practice model in English and Spanish. The Park Ridge center opened in 1997. It is a beautiful facility with a staff that provides services in Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish. The Brooklyn Chinese Health Center, a thoroughly modern facility, opened in 2003 and offers care in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. The new dental facility at the Caribbean American Family Health Center opened in 2006. The facility is digitally equipped and will be paperless. Health services are offered in English, Haitian Creole, Spanish, and French.
Southwest Brooklyn-The Neighborhoods
With over three million residents, Brooklyn is the largest of the five boroughs that comprise New York City. Brooklyn hosts distinct communities that offer magnificent views of the Manhattan skyline and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the second-longest single span bridge in the world. It contains historic neighborhoods and wonderful parks. It is home to cultural treasures such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Brooklyn is a short subway or ferry ride away from Manhattan, an international center of business, art, and entertainment.
A beautiful 25-acre park gives the Brooklyn community of Sunset Park its name and the western edge of the park offers a spectacular view of the Manhattan skyline. Settled more than 150 years ago, the waterfront was the source of critical jobs in factories, warehouses, and piers. The neighborhood reflects the waves of immigration into Brooklyn. Businesses, restaurants, and markets are a hodgepodge of Irish, Polish, Norwegian, Finnish, Italian, Puerto Rican, Middle Eastern, and Chinese heritages. Today, Sunset Park includes “Brooklyn’s Chinatown.”
Park Slope, the most cosmopolitan New York neighborhood outside of Manhattan, has a “European feel” and contains one of the most beautiful Victorian areas in the country. Strong community activism marks The Slope, a highly desirable residential area of tree lined streets and brownstone homes. The main shopping street, Seventh Avenue, conveys a small town atmosphere but hosts a bevy of specialty food shops, boutiques, florists, and antique and craft stores where owners often do business on a first name basis.
Bay Ridge was part of the 16th century Dutch village of New Utrecht and known as Yellow Hook, because of the color of the sand on its beaches. In 1776, George Washington, facing British and Hessian forces, led a strategic retreat from the area that probably saved the fledgling revolutionary army. The village was abandoned in the mid-nineteenth century after tides carried bedding and clothing from a contaminated ship to its shore and spread Yellow Fever. The village was quickly resurrected and renamed Bay Ridge for its lovely bay and the glacial moraine overlooking it. This proud, tidy working-class community still offers panoramic bay views, a 20-block long restaurant row, and charming mom and pop specialty shops.
Flatbush was one of Brooklyn’s original six towns and is centrally located in the borough. Its history is rich, proud, and steeped in tradition. Its name is taken from the Dutch meaning wooded land and the Flatbush Dutch Reformed Church was established by Peter Stuyvesant in 1654. Today it contains well-known institutions such as Erasmus High School and Brooklyn College and numerous yeshivas serving a large Orthodox Jewish community. East Flatbush now is a vibrant center for Caribbean immigrants to Brooklyn.
Metropolitan New York City Community Health Centers
There are over 700 community health centers in the United States. They grew over the past quarter century in response to the critical need for health care services for the poor. Community health centers are unique organizations because the communities that they serve control them. They differ from each other because they must respond to the needs and forces within their own communities where they are often the health care safety net. They and their related hospitals most often serve the poor, the working poor, and the underserved where the health needs are vast and the learning opportunities for dental residents are almost infinite.
Community health centers are modern and well-equipped facilities with dedicated staff who understand the importance of meeting the needs of their patients. The dental facilities typically have a mix of general dentists and specialists together with other professional and support staff. Because they want to be part of graduate dental education, the staffs successfully instill in residents the desire to provide excellent and compassionate care in tightly managed and highly competitive health care systems. Lutheran maintains affiliations with a number of community health centers scattered throughout the New York metropolitan area as part of its Advanced Education Program in General Dentistry.
Bedford-Stuyvesant Community Health Center in Brooklyn is a Federally funded center that has been serving the Bedford Stuyvesant community for over twenty years. The center, located across from Restoration Plaza, a major cultural and commercial renewal project in the community, is a modern health care facility. The JCAHO-accredited center provides primary medical care, a broad range of specialty care including ophthalmology, cardiology, and podiatry, and dental services. The center also provides community outreach programs for foster care and HIV. The staff achieves comprehensive health care of high quality through close partnerships between dentistry and the other medical departments. The health center has three dental operatories and the staff includes three general dentists; a part-time orthodontist, oral surgeon, and dental hygienist; and four dental assistants. Dental residents can expect to provide a wide range of restorative dentistry and to collaborate closely in oral surgery. Residents are full partners with the congenial, dedicated staff united to meet the oral health needs of the “Bed-Stuy” community.
Established in 1971, the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center focuses on the health care needs of the underserved Chinese community in New York City. It is located in desirable downtown Manhattan between SOHO and Wall Street. The entire staff is bilingual and patients travel from throughout the city to the center in Chinatown for health care. The services provided at the center include internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, and dentistry. The center offers strong outreach programs that emphasize health promotion and disease prevention and hosts a community resource library with pamphlets on over 100 health-related topics. The center, assessed by the Federal Bureau of Primary Health Care, Primary Care Effectiveness Review, is a training site for primary care medical residents. The center began offering dental services in 1994. The services are comprehensive with particular attention to preventive care, restorative dentistry including endodontics and prosthetics, and pediatric dentistry. Dental residents must be bilingual.
“Community health centers…are often the health care safety net.”
The Michael Callen-Audre Lorde Community Health Center
Faculty Interviews
”...Smiles are precious.”
Located in West Harlem in New York City, Heritage HealthCare Center (HHCC) is one of two divisions of Heritage Health and Housing Inc., a not for profit corporation incorporated in 1968 by Harlem residents to provide primary medical care, mental health care, and housing in the Harlem and Washington Heights communities. The Federally qualified health center is assessed by the Federal Bureau of Primary Health Care, Primary Care Effectiveness Review. It was established in 1980 and since then it has offered comprehensive health care including: dental, pediatric, ophtalmology, podiatric, gynecological, and HIV services to the underserved and uninsured-in their own neighborhood. The center serves the local African American and Dominican communities but the staff is multicultural and multilingual, proficient in Spanish, French, Farsi, Gujarati (Indian), and Yiddish. HHCC has referral agreements with St. Luke’s Medical Center and the Ralph Lauren Center for Cancer Care and Prevention and has strong ties with many community-based organizations in Harlem. Harlem is undergoing another renaissance and gentrification. The patient population is changing and while primarily serving the Medicaid and uninsured populations, the center accommodates expanding insurance options.
Dental residents can anticipate a private practice experience at the HHCC. Over time, residents will be guided through increasing responsibility and independence. The dental facility has five operatories and the staff includes two general dentists and two dental assistants. AEGD residents and third- and fourth-year dental students from Columbia University rotate through the center on short-term assignments as do dental assisting students from local educational programs. The dental team is committed to preserving the health of its patients and fostering a caring environment that will help residents make a confident transition from training to practice.
The Joseph P. Addabbo Health Center is the only Federally funded center in Queens. Accredited by JCAHO, the center provides comprehensive health services to over 9,000 medically indigent and underserved residents of the Rockaway Peninsula. It has been praised by the Federal government for immunizing more children than any other facility in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The dental facilities have three sites near the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean. The primary site, in a new building in 2006, has six operatories. The two satellite sites have two and one operatories, respectively. All have digital radiography. The centers operate as interdisciplinary group practices, and maintain affiliations with local hospitals. The dental department is actively involved with community-based and school outreach programs. Residents provide continuous care to individual patients throughout the year and have exposure to a full range of services excluding intravenous sedation and implants.
Morris Heights Health Center, located in the southwest Bronx close to the home of the New York Yankees, is a not-for-profit full service, independent health center. It offers medical, dental, behavioral, and women’s primary health care services and manages over 100,000 health care visits a year. Morris Heights has three dental sites, equipped with fourteen chairs and a staff of general dentists and an on-site pediatric dentist. The center offers a full range of comprehensive services in a bright, friendly, family-oriented facility. Morris Heights emphasizes preventive services, complete oral health care, and interaction with the medical staff. The center serves a large population with significant oral health needs and affords residents the opportunity to gain significant experience, while making a difference in patients’ lives. Morris Heights, accredited for almost 20 years by the JCAHO, has welcomed Lutheran’s AEGD residents since the early 1990s.
The Big Apple
New York City, described as the business, entertainment, and publishing capital of the country, began as a ragtag Dutch settlement overlooking New York Bay in 1625. Now the site is a great international harbor and the city is a magnet for world class art and theater. The Big Apple teems with culturally rich communities. Residents live and work among its manmade canyons at a hectic pace, tempered by dramatic skylines, lush parks, myriad ethnic neighborhoods, and unexpectedly beautiful beaches.
Manhattan, the smallest of the five boroughs of New York City, thrives on theater, on Broadway and off-, and an international nightlife and cuisine. It is home to the United Nations. Manhattan houses the extraordinary Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Museum of Modern Art. Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts draws lovers of music and dance. The American Museum of Natural History satisfies those curious about ancient cultures, biology, and evolution. Families romp in Central Park, take theme tours of Harlem, or take in the Knicks at Madison Square Garden. They marvel at the panoramic views from the Empire State Building or ferry to the Statue of Liberty to contemplate the immigrant heritage of America.
The boroughs of the Bronx and Queens offer their own special contrasts to the hubbub of daily urban life. The Bronx is the only borough of New York City on the mainland. A Dutch sea captain of Swedish heritage, Jonas Bronck, and his wife brought indentured servants from Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands and settled in the area that came to be known as “Da Bronx.” More than 600 species of animals, tended in naturalistic environments, reside in the Bronx Zoo and Wildlife Conservation Park. The New York Botanical Gardens covers more than 250 acres and contains the world-renowned Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, displaying plants in their natural habitats…and ardent fans cheer their beloved team at Yankee
Stadium.
In Queens, one discovers the history of motion pictures, television and digital media at the American Museum of the Moving Image or bikes through Flushing Meadows Corona Park, site of two world’s fairs and the U. S. Tennis Center. Despite the presence of John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia Airports, distinct neighborhoods thrive in the borough. Bird lovers explore the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, its 9,000 acres a major stopover for more than 300 species of migrating birds. Many families spend lazy weekends on the beaches of Far Rockaway…and equally ardent fans cheer the Mets at Shea Stadium.
Take a bite of the Big Apple and you, too, will learn to love New York!
© 2006 Lutheran Medical Center Department of Dental Medicine
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