|
|
GROUNDBREAKING SOON FOR NEW DENTAL CLINIC
Thursday, November 13th, 2008 -- 10:16 am
Posted by Riley Hebert-News Director
The Executive Director of the organization planning to construct a regional dental clinic in Neillsville says they’ve run into some delays, but still hope to have the facility open by July 1st, 2009.
Greg Nycz of the Family Health Center of Marshfield says they’re waiting for some environmental impact studies on the 3-acre parcel near the American Legion in the Boon Commercial Park.
Officials still hope to have the 10,000 square-foot facility housing five dentists and five hygienists open by July 1, 2009.
It will be subsidized by both federal and state government funds.
With fewer private practice dentists accepting medical assistance, dental care has become a health care crisis.
"What we're learning from a lot of the research is that the mouth is, in fact, attached to the body," Nycz says, "Problems that go on in the mouth can affect general health."
The result of patients putting off expensive dental work is often more expensive trips to the emergency rooms.
Experience has proven to Nycz that, if you build it, they will come.
"In Park Falls, one of the things we saw was we were seeing a lot of the patients that were coming round trip more than a hundred miles or so, and they had insurance. You'd wonder why they would travel so far to go to a really busy safety net clinic. The answer was there just weren't enough dentists to take them," Nycz says.
Just like with health care, Nycz says it’s difficult to lure dentists to rural practice, so they recruit aggressively.
"They graduate in May sometime and they're ready for practice in July, so the timing of opening in July is actually a lot nicer than what we tried to do in Park Falls in March, from a recruitment standpoint," he notes.
Once open, Nycz would not be surprised to see patients come to Neillsville from 40 counties.
|
|
|
VIEW OUR ARCHIVE
|
|
