For more than a decade, the University of Maryland Dental School in Baltimore, in collaboration with state and national dental associations, has sent its hygiene and dental students out to low-income, inner-city, and rural areas where children have limited access to dental care.
This year, the school expanded its outreach to six weeks of each student's dental education, the school announced in a press release.
"We want to imprint in our students that not only are they practitioners, they are part of a community that needs the care of professionals," said Norman Tinanoff, D.D.S., M.S., program director of the school's Department of Pediatric Dentistry, in the press release.
According to Dr. Tinanoff, the students are taught that dentistry is more than a technical surgical specialty. Rather, their education is aimed at experiencing service to the community "in different social environments, especially what they don't see at the dental school," he said.
The pediatric student outreach projects slated for this year include providing dental care to migrant worker's children on Maryland's Eastern Shore, recent immigrants and their children who may not have citizenship and may not have access to state and federal programs, the Langley Park Latino community in central Maryland, the Esperanza Center in Baltimore, and rural communities in far northern Maryland and the Eastern Shore.
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