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CHP expands mission to include oral health clinic, to open in April
By Michael Kelley, Berkshire Record, December 22, 2006

Great Barrington—Southern Berkshire County can smile now. 

Children’s Health Program, located on Castle Street, is expanding its existing services to improve access to oral health care in Southern Berkshire County.  CHP, which was established to provide health care and social services to local children and their parents, saw a need for proper oral health care in the area and decided to do something about it.

With the help of a multi-year grant from the Oral Health Foundation --$429,000 is awarded for the first year—CHP will be setting up a oral health clinic in the Berkshire Community College Building on Main Street.  CHP Executive Director Joyce Toth said right now CHP is renovating and updating the space to fit its needs and hope for an April 2007 opening date for the clinic.

“There is a tremendous need for oral health care in the Southern Berkshires,” said Toth.  “It fits in so beautifully with our mission …we thought it was very important to include oral health care to our services.  [It] fills in a gap that exists in the community.”

While the organization’s top priority is providing services to children, the oral health clinic will be available for everyone–children, adults and the elderly—regardless of financial situations or access to dental insurance.

Toth said the grant will provide enough staffing to accommodate 2,000 dental visits for the first year.

According to figures provided by the Oral Health Foundation, access to oral health care is a state-wide problem, but disparities are greater in Western Massachusetts than anywhere else in the state.  It is estimated by the 2006 Massachusetts Oral Health Report that 30 percent of cities and towns in Massachusetts don’t have enough dentists to care for the people who live there and 74 percent of cities and towns have no dental specialists, with 65 percent having no pediatric dentists.

“There are 2 million Massachusetts residents, mostly children, who do not have access to oral health care,” said Ralph Fuccillo, president of Oral Health Foundation in a written statement.

“It is our goal to shift the paradigm of poor oral health from a narrow focus…to an action-oriented approach that addresses the causes of the inexcusable disparities we see in oral health throughout the Commonwealth,” he continued.

The grant awarded to CHP is part of $4 million dollars in grants the Oral Health Foundation has provided to several organizations across the state in 2006 in hopes of improving access to quality oral health care for thousands of Massachusetts residents.

According to Fuccillo, other programs in Berkshire County benefiting from grants in recent years include Hillcrest Educational Cares, Inc. in Pittsfield, which has been funded by Oral Health Foundation since 2000 and provides oral health care for special needs groups like nursing homes residents or low income families.

Oral Health Foundation has also provided grants to REACH Community Health Foundation for school-based programs health education programs in North Adams schools.

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