In coastal West Africa, a woman looks forward to life without dental pain. In Central America, a child with a cleft palate awaits the surgery that will transform the rest of his life. In a rural county in the Eastern United States, a family that hasn’t seen a dentist in a long time makes plans to get the care they’d come to believe was beyond their reach.
Boundaries that separate people from the oral care they need can be geographic, economic, or both. A‑dec launched the Impact initiative to help make dental expertise and advanced technology accessible around the globe. It’s led to alliances with an inspiring community of charitable partners, nonprofits and organizations—and the work we’re doing together is having a positive impact on countless lives.
Helping today and training for tomorrow
Expanding access to dental care often requires more than delivering equipment or services to address today’s immediate needs. It also can involve upstream efforts, like developing a local community of care professionals by investing in dental education. That’s currently the case in Guinea. In this West African nation, A‑dec’s longtime partnership with Mercy Ships helps serve today’s dental needs while setting the stage for expanded, locally based services tomorrow.
Since its founding in 1978, Mercy Ships has delivered free, world-class healthcare services to more than 70 countries in the developing world. Its hospital ships, Global Mercy and Africa Mercy, sail with an international crew of volunteers including surgeons, dentists, nurses, healthcare trainers, teachers and more. A‑dec’s donation of onboard dental equipment has served more than 186,500 patients in more than 488,000 dental procedures.
Answering the need for in-country expertise
But in many countries, far more remains to be done. Dr. David Ugai, Mercy Ships Country Director for Guinea, puts the size of the challenge in context. “There’s somewhere between 300 and 400 dentists practicing in Guinea … responsible for treating the entire population. [That’s] somewhere between one-per-million and one-per-500,000 persons [which is] tenfold, a hundredfold, off the actual ratio of what is considered acceptable for access to oral healthcare.” This reality led Mercy Ships to approach A‑dec for assistance with their dream of building a dental school in Guinea.
“The opportunity really spoke to us,” says Jordan Beanblossom, Head of Communications at A‑dec. “It’s rooted in solving this foundational issue when it comes to access to care. The way we can contribute is by providing dental equipment that’s tested for durability and tested for reliability, to set up this next generation of dentists and hygienists for success.”
“We’ve based the whole expansion of our program, entering into other countries and developing other dental schools, on that equipment,” Dr. Ugai adds. In just a few short years, A‑dec’s support of Mercy Ships has helped train over 1,000 students from 18 nations, leading to a groundswell of care providers that will make a direct impact on the continent of Africa.
Making long-term commitments to care
Establishing and educating local communities of dental care professionals is a long-term commitment. So too is the specialized care needed for individual patients with dental conditions such as cleft palate. Children who grow up with this condition face challenges that extend far beyond physical appearance; it can also severely impact their social and emotional well-being. And the need is great: five billion people do not have access to essential surgical care. That’s where Operation Smile, a global nonprofit founded in 1982 by Bill and Kathy Magee, comes in—providing cleft palate patients with treatment that is literally life-transforming.
Over the past five years, A‑dec has donated equipment to Operation Smile clinics in Guatemala, Costa Rica and Haiti. These contributions have helped remove the boundaries that block access to the complex and lengthy cleft palate treatment process, which can take up to 18 years to complete. With A‑dec’s support, many children can now look forward to a brighter future, because world-class care is within reach.
“It is so important for our children to have dental care after their surgery,” says Operation Smile co-founder Kathy Magee. “We could not have done this without the complete dental chair that was donated.”
Filling gaps to deliver on a promise
Back in 1966, A‑dec co-founder Ken Austin created a dental cart specifically for public health and missionary dentistry. This was the beginning of decades of product development and humanitarian efforts to support missionary dentistry around the world—and closer to home here in the United States.
Today, in many rural and low-income American communities, multiple barriers separate underserved and uninsured people from every kind of healthcare, including dental. These gaps in the system include lack of health insurance, high cost of care even with insurance, and geographic isolation from doctors and dentists.
One nonprofit, Remote Area Medical (RAM), has helped more than a million patients overcome the boundaries that separate them from vital healthcare services. RAM partners with local leaders, and fueled by donors and volunteers, operates pop-up clinics that deliver free dental, vision and medical care across America. Equipment donations from A‑dec help make the cleanings, fillings, extractions and X-rays that RAM dental clinics provide possible.
Putting people first
One of A‑dec's guiding principles is Concern for People. Beyond dental professionals, it includes the countless patients whose lives have been touched, and even transformed, through A‑dec equipment.
The A‑dec Impact initiative is centered on carrying that people-first outlook forward, with a focus on removing boundaries to the quality dental care everyone deserves. As A‑dec’s Jordan Beanblossom puts it, “We look for those opportunities, whether they’re in our own backyard here in Newberg, Oregon or at dental schools and clinics halfway around the world.”
