Terraka Garner
Staff Writer
Students and faculty involved in the Idaho State University Dental Hygiene Program have just received notice of the approval of a $5,000 Wrigley Grant that is soon to be awarded to them.
The Wrigley Grant request was submitted to the Wrigley Company Foundation and approved through the American Dental Hygienists Association, or ADHA.
According to Karen Portillo, community outreach coordinator for the department of Dental Hygiene, the Wrigley Company, or the “makers of the chewing gum,” started doing a lot of funding for dental hygiene programs in 1987.
“They are doing a lot of outreach to underserved areas throughout the world, so it’s pretty cool,” said Portillo.
Students of the Dental Hygiene Program have been involved in performing dental sealants since ISU’s spring semester of 2014. The students started this program by traveling to Greenacres Elementary School.
Administrators within the Dental Hygiene Program plan to use their $5,000 grant money to expand this sealant program by also working with students from Tyhee Elementary School.
The Dental Sealant program at ISU is reportedly focused around providing free and essential dental care and education to young children, in hopes of helping ease the pain for the children.
Prior to the Wrigley grant approval, ISU dental hygiene students only had the ability to perform sealants, but not any sort of cleaning.
With the grant money, students will now have the opportunity to execute their knowledge by using newly-provided portable dental equipment to offer cleanings at new locations.
“It’s hard for children to learn when they’re in pain. They can’t eat, they can’t sleep and they don’t grow and develop if they’re in pain,” said Portillo. “It’s really an important aspect of their development and their learning to be cavity free.”
Portillo mentioned that the overall program goal is to allow for a service learning opportunity for the ISU dental students to be outside of their dental hygiene clinic in an alternative setting.
“I like being able to go in different settings. It’s not all at the clinical setting because [students] would get bored if [they] were constantly doing the same thing every day,” said Fabiola Lopez, a senior in the Dental Hygiene Program. “We get to work with veterans and children and all different grades, so that’s good.”
Portillo said that she teaches her dental students with a hands-on learning method in mind.
“The fall semester is when they’re learning about the theories or they’re learning about the different concepts and things like that, but in the spring semester we go out on community rotations so then they get to actually apply everything that they’ve learned in the fall,” said Portillo. “I think that’s a really good method.”
In order to maintain official accreditation within the Dental Hygiene Program, there reportedly has to be an established inter-professional component to the program.
Portillo said that most health science programs are making the inter-professional collaboration mandatory.
“We just had our Give Kids a Smile event last Friday and Saturday and we had the [Physicians Assistant] students there working alongside the dental hygiene students and the speech pathology students,” said Portillo. “The three of them, together, were screening the child and sharing with each other the assessment data that they were collecting while they were collecting it. It’s interesting because they collect a lot of the same data but they use it in different ways, depending on their discipline.”
ISU’s program is one of only 56 programs out of the 340 entry-level dental hygiene programs nationwide that lend students the ability to receive a bachelor’s degree rather than an associate’s degree.
“We’re not just like ‘here, here’s the quick fix’, we’re like ‘this is how you take care of your teeth’ and we give [the children] toothbrushes and floss, so that kind of encourages them to take care of their own teeth,” said Lopez.
