Gregory and the coalition’s dozen years of labour is what led to the Mobile Dental Clinic opening for business, free of charge, for children from low income families, low income adults and those enrolled in the provincial disability program.
Stretching more than 12 meters in length, the bus is staffed by a dentist, registered dental hygienist and a certified dental assistant offering those eligible free dental care Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
“Our work has paid off but there was a lot of work before that that went into getting the Ministry (of Health) to at least look at what is going on,” said Gregory of the Sisters of St. Joseph. “I really want people to see that there has been a lot of advocacy done, not just by myself but by that whole group that we got together, and now we’ve got this bus that goes around. It’s marvellous to see.”
Visits are by appointment and can be made through the organization where the Mobile Dental Clinic will be parked on any given day.
“Many people, even if they are making some money, they don’t have money to get their teeth fixed,” said Gregory. “So you’ve got a whole segment of society, especially the Toronto population, who aren’t getting their teeth done and then they end up with pretty bad mouths.”
Funded entirely through the province's Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, the bus provides a service through Toronto Public Health which, according to Gregory, is in great need.
According to Health Canada, between 2007 and 2009, 32 per cent of Canadians had no dental insurance.
While extreme cases of poor oral health can lead to heart disease, respiratory problems, even blindness, said Gregory, they all start with pain.
“Once you start getting problems with your mouth and you can’t eat and you can’t chew because you have pain, or sometimes you don’t have enough teeth, that can affect your whole system,” said the former nurse and founding member of the Toronto Oral Health Coalition. “I don’t think the government sees the mouth as part of you.”
Things weren’t always that way. For years St. Michael’s Hospital, St. Joseph’s Hospital and Toronto Western Hospital offered patients in need free emergency dental care until government funding ws cut in the late 1990s. In 1997, Gregory began volunteering on the Wellesley Health Bus, a mobile health care unit in Toronto, and soon saw the repercussions of these closures.
“I began to notice that many of the clients I was seeing on the Health Bus were in need of dental care,” she said. “I saw people coming on the Health Bus week after week with bad teeth and we had no place to send them. You can only give them some pain medication and send them to the hospital.”
Unwilling to sit back quietly knowing people were suffering, Gregory began forming an informal oral health coalition in 2000. By September the following year the team had produced its “Dental Care: Who has Access?” report.
Over the next seven years the team continued to lobby governments at the local, provincial and national levels which eventually earned it a $45 million annual provincial investment to reopen some of the closed clinics, including one at St. Michael’s Hospital.
Now the team, which evolved into the Toronto Oral Health Coalition, has the Mobile Dental Clinic.
“This means that those of us who are less fortunate and who have difficulty accessing dental care will now have an alternate way of getting one of the most ignored primary health care services … primary oral health care,” said Gregory. “I cannot express in words my feelings of gratitude and elation to realize we have come to this day.”
For more information regarding eligibility and locations of the bus, see the health section at www.toronto.ca.