By Refferty Bake, Vancouver Sun |
More than 200 elementary school children will be picked up this week by the Tooth Trolley and taken to the Vancouver Community College downtown campus to get some free dental care.
By Refferty Bake, Vancouver Sun |
More than 200 elementary school children will be picked up this week by the Tooth Trolley and taken to the Vancouver Community College downtown campus to get some free dental care.
The Tooth Trolley project is part of the VCC’s certified dental assistants program — it makes up part of the students’ final assessment as they near the end of the 10-month program — and it gets the children a much-needed visit to a dentist.
“We got it together, initially to provide our certified dental assisting students with patients, then we realized how beneficial it was to the children that attend, as well,” said instructor Margaret Dennett, who noted that the children are checked by a dentist before her students begin their work.
Dennett, who started the program with another instructor, Sherry Messenger, is marking 10 years of the Tooth Trolley project this year.
“We know that children require care and many of the children that we are involved with come from schools we consider underprivileged who may never have had any formal dentistry.”