Dentaid has a long standing commitment to support outreach dental projects and send volunteers to Uganda where they provide oral health education, tooth brushing programmes and pain relieving treatment. The charity is now hoping to support a new dental clinic at Wagagai flower farm and establish the first dental lab in the east of the country.
Around 2,000 people work at Wagagai flower farm and the owners provide healthcare for staff and their families. However, there is no permanent dental unit and Dentaid is fundraising to help provide a permanent clinic that would benefit 8,000 people. The charity is also looking at locations for a dental lab to make dentures – a service that currently requires patients’ impressions to be taken to the capital Kampala by bus, resulting in long waiting times.
A team of UK volunteer dental professionals spent two weeks in Uganda, treating around 1,000 people who have no other access to dental care. They started at Food Step orphanage treating very young children who were being cared for after being rescued from extreme poverty. They also visited Kampiringisa children’s prison, checking the youngsters’ teeth, providing fluoride treatment and carrying out many extractions and fillings to get 143 children out of dental pain. Some of the volunteers also went to the slums of Mbale where they set up a clinic in a local church. Among the 45 people they treated was the local policeman who had never seen a dentist in his life.
The team also treated 400 people, including street children, orphans and widows, at the River of Life Community Project and set up clinics at prisons in Jinja and Masaka. They worked in remote villages offering outreach dentistry and ran a clinic at CoRSU hospital in Nkumba. They also delivered oral health education lectures, gave tooth brushing advice and handed out toothbrushes and toothpaste.
“Everywhere we went we received the most incredible welcome and the people were so friendly,” said John Elkins, finance and project manager for Dentaid. “For many years Dentaid has run volunteering trips and supported outreach in Uganda and the teams do an incredible job. But now we would like to set up something more permanent with a clinic and dental lab that we know will bring tremendous benefit.
“We saw many people with extreme dental decay. Lots of them chew on sugar cane and the price of sugary fizzy drinks is about the same as bottled water so many children are in dental pain and there simply aren’t enough dentists. Therefore, the oral health education side of our work is really important. It was an emotional and memorable trip that none of the volunteers will ever forget.”
To support Dentaid’s work in Uganda please visit https://mydonate.bt.com/charities/dentaid
For more information about the charity visit www.dentaid.org