Access to Dental Care Program Award: The Good Samaritan Free Health Center Dental Clinic
Dr. Amanda Baker Grau, dental director at the Good Samaritan Free Health Center Dental Clinic, sees a patient. The Good Samaritan Free Health Center Dental Clinic is the 2024 recipient of the Ohio Dental Association Access to Dental Care Program Award.
The Good Samaritan Free Health Center Dental Clinic, which provides dental care to uninsured patients in Hamilton County, will receive the 2024 Ohio Dental Association Access to Dental Care Program Award on Friday, Sept. 13 at the Callahan Celebration of Excellence, held in conjunction with the 158th ODA Annual Session.
The Good Samaritan Free Health Center is a patient-centered medical home that provides free primary, specialty, nutrition, dental and mental health care to uninsured adults who are not Medicaid- or Medicare-eligible.
“One of the amazing things is they do get their entire care here: dental, health services, nutrition, specialists,” said Dr. Amanda Baker Grau, dental director at the Free Health Center. “They are all screened on the medical side before I see them, and I have access to all of their records. It really is a full team effort.”
The dental clinic opened 12 years ago and provides comprehensive care including fillings, extractions, some root canals and cleanings.
Last year, the clinic was able to add prosthetics thanks to a grant from the Delta Dental Foundation. The clinic partners with the Ohio Penal Industries’ Dental Services Lab, where inmates enroll in a four-year program to train and obtain certification as laboratory technicians. The partnership allows the clinic to save money on the cost of prosthetics, which gives them the ability to serve more patients. So far, about 100 patients have received prosthetics through the clinic.
“I’m really proud of the prosthetics program,” Grau said. “We went to visit the prison, and this seems like a natural extension of what we’re doing here.”
Grau said many of their patients have never seen a dentist before, so they also spend a lot of time on patient education.
“You have to start with, ‘do you know what a cavity is?’ This population doesn’t know the very basics of what most people take for granted,” she said. “We spend an hour with every patient and we don’t do any treatment the first day, instead they get a huge lesson. If they have seen a dentist, they’re blown away by what they didn’t know.”
She added that this also helps make going to the dentist seem less scary for patients.
The clinic has a dentist and hygienist on staff and works with volunteer dentists to provide care.
The clinic is located in a low-income neighborhood just west of downtown Cincinnati that is a Dental Health Professional Shortage Area. According to the health center, a lower-income person in Cincinnati will die approximately 18 years before a person with higher income.
“Our patients are taken care of like family here,” Grau said. “We’ve changed their lives in many ways because it extends their longevity, and they have the ability to take care of themselves because they have tools and access to care. The patients are so grateful.”
The clinic moved from an acute care model to a comprehensive care model in 2020 when it hired Grau, and the clinic has seen a lot of growth since opening. In fiscal year 2014, the clinic performed 823 procedures during 239 appointments. In fiscal year 2023, the clinic performed 7,876 procedures during 1,672 appointments. The clinic currently has a two-year waiting list.
“The patients are so amazing here,” Grau said. “They’re so grateful. I feel like dentistry is a very high stress job, people complain a lot, are in pain and they already hate you. The environment here is just different. I don’t think many people can like their job as much as I like my job. I look forward to coming, it’s just such a happy place to work, and the patients are so grateful. I’m getting paid, but it just feels like you’re doing charity all the time. I’m in the field to do good and I’m actually getting paid to do that. It just feels right. We’re doing the right thing, we’re doing a good job, we take care of patients from the minute they walk in the door, they’re just treated like family.”
When the Free Health Center opened in 2011, the director of the Center, Linda Smith-Berry, had a vision that dental care should be part of the Center, Grau said. The Free Health Center is 100% philanthropically funded through the Good Samaritan Foundation.
The ODA’s Access to Dental Care Program Award honors an outstanding program that helps reduce the access to care problem in Ohio by offering free or reduced fee dental care to underserved populations.
