AUSTIN (KXAN) — More than 600 people in Texas were provided with free dental care over the weekend as part of a network of dental offices’ way of giving back to their communities.
Smile Generation, a national dental care provider with over 1,000 offices across the U.S., has held a “Serve Day” every year since 2011, providing dental outreach to underserved patients at no cost.
This year’s Serve Day was held this past weekend. In Texas, over 600 people received needed dental work, amounting to $2.5 million in donated dentistry, according to a press release.
A dentist in Georgetown said his office treated around 20 people and provided more than $75,000 worth of dental work, at no cost to the patients.
Doctor Michael Young, who owns two Austin-area dental practices, has been participating in the Serve Day initiative for nine years now. He said it’s their annual “give back” to the community, and that they use the day to try and help patients who are underserved or have fallen on hard times and can’t afford dental care on a regular basis.
“Time, fear and money are some of the things keeping people from doing dentistry, so we wanted to make a day where we give back to those that are maybe a little cost-prohibitive in being able to afford the dentistry that they need,” Young said.
“I think, you know, as dentists, we really got into this because we care about health and healthcare and giving back to the community,” Young said. “This is a way for us to kind of bridge that gap for some underserved populations.”
Young talked about a patient he helped during Serve Day this year, who had fallen on hard times and needed about $20,000 worth of dental care. He said all the patient wanted was to be able to smile in front of her kids and not be ashamed, and she got to walk out of the dentist’s office being able to do that.
“She was the daughter of one of my patients that’s been with me for years,” Young explained. “She had gone through some hard times, and her and her husband kind of got their lives back on track, but they just couldn’t afford dentistry. So we brought her in.”
Young said he and his team were able to extract a few teeth that had decayed and give her a temporary bridge until they could finish the root canal process on those teeth.
“It was a good day for everyone,” Young said. “She left smiling and in a lot better spot.”
Smile Generation partnered with Everyone for Veterans and Hire Heroes USA for Serve Day this year to connect veterans and others without access to care to free oral health services. According to Smile Generation, more than 80% of U.S. veterans are not eligible for dental coverage.
“A lot of times, dental care isn’t in the budget,” Young said. “You know, if it doesn’t hurt, it’s not painful, it kinda goes by the wayside, but those things add up. I would say dentistry usually never gets cheaper, unless we have a day that we can get people back on track.”
Smile Generation’s Serve Day usually happens every year, on the third Saturday of August, according to the company’s website.