The OU College of Dentistry is reaching out to the state’s rural communities to provide dental education and care to areas that have long needed dental professionals.

The College of Dentistry is participating in a five-year pilot program created by the American Dental Association to train students in health care centers across the nation in areas that lack access to dental care, said Dunn Cumby, chairman of the Division of Community Dentistry.

The Community Dental Health Coordinator program will add a new classification of dental care providers, said Karen Hart, director of the Council on Dental Education and Licensure. A community dental health coordinator will be any health worker who undergoes some basic dental training, Hart said.

OU, the University of California in Los Angeles and Temple University in Philadelphia are the first to adopt the pilot program, Cumby said. Within five years, programs will be established in rural Oklahoma communities, Native American communities in California and urban communities in Pennsylvania, Cumby said.

OU’s program is currently training six students who should be ready to begin seeing patients in 18 months. The students will spend the first year in online coursework, and will intern at local, rural health care centers during the last six months.

All six students live in the rural Oklahoma towns the program seeks to help, like Clayton, Baptist and Tishomingo.

Once their training is complete, the students will go into the community and provide dental education and basic dental examinations, Hart said.

“The big thing is patient education and prevention. What we can do is educate the population and have an effect on the future,” Cumby said.

The program is aimed at bringing communities dental health care by training people within their community, Cumby said.

“It’s a distribution problem; We don’t have people going to areas where they are really needed,” said Cumby.

The community dental coordinators will be trained to handle basic dental care like cleaning, examinations and basic repairs, Hart said. They will also encourage and motivate people to set up appointments with dentists at these health centers, Cumby said.

“The idea is to expand the treatment capability of these centers,” Cumby said.

Community dental coordinators are different from dental hygienists because they have less training and responsibility, and will focus on areas that are usually underserved by dental hygienists, Hart said.

The cost of seeing the community dental coordinator will vary depending on the health center, Hart said.

“We believe it’s important to get people to change habits,” said Hart, “I have heard dentists say, ‘We can’t drill and fill our way out of this problem.’”