State agency plans Maui dental clinic
By Timothy Hurley
Advertiser Maui County Bureau
WAILUKU, Maui — After providing dental services to O'ahu's neediest elderly and disabled residents for decades, the state is moving to open a similar clinic on Maui.
Karen Hu, chief of the state Department of Health's Hospital and Community Dental Services Branch, announced yesterday that a clinic will open next spring in Wailuku thanks to financing approved in the 2001 legislative session.
Hu said the need is proven on Maui, where dental care is not available to Medicaid patients. To comply with state guidelines, some of these patients have been forced to fly to O'ahu to receive dental treatment.
"We always felt the need for increased dental access on Maui,'' Hu said.
News of the clinic's planned opening was welcomed by Wendie Miller Schwab, chairwoman of the Maui County Dental Health Alliance.
"The problem is huge,'' said Schwab, a staff member with the Mobile Care Health Project, a program that has offered mobile dental clinics to low-income, uninsured and underinsured people on the Big Island since 1997 and Maui since last year.
An estimated 30 percent of Maui County's population of 120,000 either has no dental insurance or is underinsured.
"If we could find 10 new dentists full time on Maui, maybe we could make a dent (in the problem). It's overwhelming — a real challenge for us,'' Schwab said.
The new state clinic will be able to help only a small number of those people. Like its four O'ahu counterparts, it will accept only the neediest people: Medicaid fee-for-service patients who are blind, disabled or older than 65. On Maui, there are about 2,400 such patients, Hu said.
The new clinic, backed by $400,000 over two years, will have one dentist and two dental assistants providing basic comprehensive service, including exams, cleaning, X-rays, root canals, dentures and oral surgery.
While treatment will not be free, patients will pay an average of about 10 percent of the normal fee.
Wailuku was chosen, Hu said, because of its central location and proximity to other medical services in the community. She wouldn't say exactly where the new clinic would be.
"We're trying our hardest to open sooner,'' she said.
O'ahu patients must wait five to six months for services at the four state dental clinics: Diamond Head Clinic in Kaimuki, Lanakila Dental Clinic in Kalihi, Leeward Dental Clinic in Pearl City and Windward Dental Clinic in Kane'ohe.
Correction: Wendie Miller Schwab was a paid staff member with the Mobile Care Health Project. Because of a reporter's error, she was misidentified as a volunteer in a previous version of this story.
