Colville

Before my RUOP, I never considered community health as a serious option for a place to work, but working in Colville has helped me to see the bright side of community health dental clinics. Now, I could see myself working in a community clinic. Colville is a unique and great place - both the town and the clinic. I have really enjoyed my time here. The staff has been really good about letting me jump right in and participate, which has been great. I just wish I was further along in my education, so I could do more. The clinic is busy and there is plenty of work to do.

I have really enjoyed my associations with the patients. The population is quite diverse here. I have met people from all different backgrounds. Sometimes it is a fun challenge to try to get patients to smile at least once before they leave. Some of the people I have met have really tugged at my heart, and I wish there was more I could do. There are some neat experiences that I have had, while visiting with patients, but I don't know how much I can say about patients on here. I will share more later.

An interesting thing has happened to me, as I have been working here. I have come to see things differently than I had seen them before, in regards to the need for rural dentistry. Colville has 10 different dental offices (9 private practice offices and 1 community clinic). That is a lot more dental offices than I expected, and some offices have multiple dentists in them. I have come to see that the problem (at least in Northeastern Washington) isn't that there aren't enough dentists here, but the reimbursement is so limited that most dentists can't afford to see many state insured patients. Here at the clinic, the reimbursement is different for DSHS patients than what private offices receive, so the clinic is able to see a lot of DSHS patients, which is great, because there is a huge need here (there are a lot of state-insured patients in this area). The problem here isn't that the number of dentists is insufficient, which differs from what I have been told about rural dentistry. There are plenty of dentists, and most of them want to serve DSHS patients, but few can afford to do so.

I hope to be a part of the solution to reaching the underserved, but it is a really complicated problem, and I have a lot to learn still. That is something that I have been thinking about and trying to learn more about, while working out here.

RUOP is going good - better than I expected.