Dental nonprofit TeamSmile and Colgate are teaming up to provide free care to underserved kids who may never have visited a dentist. The group was in Fayetteville last week, and Ozarks at Large's Jack Travis attended the event and offers this report.
Dentists can elicit strong reactions from children, but TeamSmile Executive Director John McCarthy says they're rarely this joyful.
"The idea is to take the fear out of dentistry. Make it fun. Make it cool for the kids. By combining sports with dentistry, the DJ going."
But here at the University of Arkansas' Randal Tyson Track Center and things look a little differently than they usually do. Dozens of kids, volunteers and dentists surround roughly half a million dollars' worth of equipment as the children enter the building. Staff hand them lanyards with patient cards.
"So here they're going to do the exams for the children after they got their mouth washed. And they're going to, you'll notice that the dentists have these charts and they're going to mark down anything and everything that they do and sign it, anything that they see in their mouth.
"And then from there they're going to send most of them, unless it's just they know clearly what needs to be done. They'll send most of them down here to X-ray."
They'll get cleanings, X-rays and even operations if need be. Pretty much anything they could get at a dentist office, all at the track center.
"We do it right here. So we have licensed dentists, licensed hygienists, dental assistants that are all here volunteering their time today, literally completely volunteered. They don't get paid. They're taking their day off of work to serve those that need the help. And so it's quite an operation.
"So these are all the dental units over here. So just stopping for just a moment. If they diagnose over here and they look and say, 'Geez, this child really needs some help. They've got two teeth that are rotting and they could get infected. We need to extract those teeth.' They'll literally pull the teeth here. They'll numb them up, extract their teeth right here.
"If they look and say, 'Geez, Johnny or Susie has five cavities, they got to get those filled. They're getting pretty bad.' They'll fill the cavities right here. They need a pulpotomy. They do it right here. So we have the licensed dentists. We travel around about roughly 600,000 to 700,000 bucks' worth of equipment and supplies."
In addition to the equipment, there's a DJ, face painters, games that allow kids to learn more about comprehensive oral hygiene without making it boring. Because as Colgate's manager of community oral health, Anaika Forbes Grant, explains, oral health is intrinsically connected to whole-body health.
"So we have education stations here. We're talking to them all the way from how to wash their hands, because hand hygiene is important. It's oral hygiene. We're talking to them about how to brush their teeth, how many minutes you spend brushing their teeth.
"And we're also showing them the value of knowing nutrition, good foods, not-so-good foods. What's going to keep your teeth clean? What's going to keep them maybe not so healthy? And we even go through exercise with them because a healthy mouth and a healthy body makes you a healthy person."
The unit's elements are tactile, easy, fun items for little hands to grasp, paired with digestible concepts.
"We always start with hand hygiene, right? Because you want to make sure that if you're brushing your teeth, your hands are clean. So we have what we call the game puzzle. What they do is we kind of make it like a puzzle. We mix it up and they have to tell us in order of how to wash your hands. So go from turning on the faucet all the way to grabbing a towel to dry your hands.
"Then we have a sensory game where they put their hands on two different set of teeth. One is a little bit fuzzy and one is super clean. They put their hands on it. Tactile sensitivity to understand this one doesn't feel so good. This one feels good. How do we get the good tooth? How do we get the not-so-good tooth to become the good tooth? And then they pick up the toothbrush and we show them how to brush their teeth for how many minutes. So they're actually doing the work themselves.
"Then we take them over to healthy and not so healthy, happy and not so happy tooth. And we have velcroed. You have the Velcro. Yeah, we have Velcro of some pictures of some good foods and some not-so-good foods, and they have to match it to the tooth that looks happy to look, that looks not so happy.
"And then our fruit game here, we turn this into all kinds of games. They can throw it. They can match the colors, but it's kind of like eat the rainbow. So we have the yellows, the purples, the reds. So we have the bananas. We have the grapes, we have the tomatoes and the apples and they're understanding eat the rainbow."
And then there's an exercise game because, and take note adults, your physical fitness plays into your oral health and vice versa.
"This is a wheel that they can spin. And if you can hear the spinning of the wheel, which everyone loves to hear that sound, it lands on an exercise and they have to do that exercise. So we have like stretching, squat jumps, running in place. That's the favorite. They love running in place, not so much in place.
"So it kind of engages their body and their mind to understand that it is a whole-body initiative, right? Oral health is not separate from overall health. It's all-inclusive and it's all together. So we're tying all of that together with their education and sprinkling a little bit of good habits that can hopefully help them last a lifetime."
This program has proved to have a lasting impact. Dr. Jessica Sliger is a dentist at the Smile Shoppe Pediatric Dentistry in Springdale. She says she learned about TeamSmile while in dental school and fell in love with the program. Her clinic is a Medicaid provider, and Ozarks at Large recently reported on their Little Heroes loyalty program, which offers care to kids without insurance, so she'll likely see some kids from the event back at the Smile Shoppe.
"So there's this network of dentists that you can join that TeamSmile will connect you to, and the dentists that volunteer oftentimes will do pro bono work. A lot of these children are in that gap where their families make too much to receive Medicaid, but their families still struggle financially. So a lot of the kids that we see through here don't get dental treatment ever.
"And so some of these children maybe are on the autism spectrum or have Down syndrome too. And really they need full-mouth rehabilitation in an oral surgery, in a surgery center, in a surgery setting. So I am the hospital dentist for Arkansas Children's Hospital. I do, and I do pro bono cases on these kids. So last year I did a $10,000 case for free. And it was a child that had severe breakdown of all the teeth, permanent teeth.
"And so we will. I also volunteer for a local organization that does dental screenings. And a lot of times we'll connect those kids to come here to TeamSmile. And then if there's a kid that needs wisdom teeth taken out, we'll connect them to our network of oral surgeons. So it's all really interconnected here. A lot of the volunteers you'll see are kind of these younger dentists that are up-and-coming and that are excited about this and have a heart for philanthropy."
She says there are some barriers to care at the event, like a lack of laughing gas, but they can connect kids with a provider that can help. Also, a positive experience can create a good association with dentists for young people, making it more likely that they'll be OK with being in an exam chair again. And as you'll hear, that positive experience was obvious at last week's event.
"We've got Razorbacks that are walking around, they've got face painting, they've got a DJ. And they'll need a higher level of care and we facilitate that for them.
"Another thing too is you've noticed some of the parents come with the children. They've never taken their child to a dentist before. So we're seeing a kid at 8 or 9 years old, never been to the dentist. And so it's a great opportunity for parent education to be able to help with them with that. Sometimes the parents also then will take us aside and say, 'I haven't been to a dentist in 10 years, can you help me?' And so we don't do adult dentistry here, but then we kind of connect them with some of the resources in Northwest Arkansas community.
"And so it's been a really, I think, important thing for Northwest Arkansas. We're getting the word out more and more. A lot of times the people that are coming to volunteer, it's just kind of by word of mouth. And so we really want to see this blossom and grow even more and see more participation from the dental professionals in the area and more Razorbacks to come out and be a part of it.
"It was really interesting. In Kansas City, you would have the Kansas City Chiefs there, cheering them on, holding their hands. And I think once TeamSmile in our state takes hold, that will become an even bigger piece to this.
"I'm one of the inaugural faculty members at Lyon College School of Dental Medicine. So we are in the works of, next year we'll have our first year of third-year dental students. That's the last year of dental school there. And we're going to, we're in the talks of having some of those students actually come down and start doing dentistry here too, so that we can start hooking people in just like they hooked me when I was a dental student. And so that's the plan and kind of exciting."
Plus, it's a positive experience for Dr. Sliger, too.
"No one likes going to the dentist. I'm a dentist and I don't like going to the dentist. I mean, that is a common complaint. It smells weird, sensory-wise. Having someone's gloves, having a grown-up you don't know have their hands in your mouth. It's very invasive. And by this being some of these kids' very first dental experience, if it can be fun and joyful and not so scary, fantastic.
"I used to be a high school teacher for seven years. And so I have a heart for children. And this is just for me. I like to do a lot of volunteer work. For me, this is one of my most very favorite events that I ever participate in."
This was TeamSmile's third year in Fayetteville, and they plan to come back next year. You can visit teamsmile.org for more information on the program and how you can get involved, either by volunteering, donating or possibly getting your kid into next year's event.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
