Since the start of last year, the University of the Western Cape’s (UWC) Dental Faculty has initiated free dental care for children with special needs in the Wynberg and Diep River areas.
These efforts will be formalised on Mandela Day to establish the Special Needs Oral Care Programme (SNOCP).
Today’s programme started at 10 am at the GlenBridges Special School in Wynberg.
The focus is on dental health care for special needs children whose challenges have adversely affected their access to conventional dental visits. Lecturer Dr Magandhree Naidoo inspired the project. She is a mother to a child with special health care needs.
The mobile oral care services provided include full dental examinations for special needs learners and their teaching assistants, oral health education and dental treatment (which includes scaling, polishing, fluoride treatment and restorative fillings).
Oral Care packs will be provided by Colgate, who has been a regular partner in many of the Dentistry Faculty’s community outreach projects.
Meanwhile, the Dentistry Faculty’s Oral Hygiene Department ran an oral health care project in Khayelitsha last week. This week, they will continue their efforts when South Africans celebrate Nelson Mandela’s legacy. Overall, the project is reaching 5500 children and their caregivers via principal or educator workshops.
The project is a collaboration between UWC’S Dentistry Faculty, Ikamva Labantu – an NGO providing early childhood development education in the Khayelitsha and Gugulethu communities – and Provincial Government of the Western Cape clinics in the Khayelitsha area.
The education project runs throughout the year with oral health input once a year. Two days of the joint effort include educational workshops focusing on personal oral health care and the potential to embed oral health into ECD centres. Because most participants have limited access to preventative care, this is followed by dental treatments at the UWC Dental Mobile Clinic for two days for the targeted group of principals and educators.
Last Wednesday, the Faculty hosted the first workshop attended by 35 principals, followed by dental screening and treatment on Friday. These services were opened to the broader community, including 30 school learners. Furthermore, 72 individuals were screened, and 41 were treated primarily for preventive treatments such as scalings, fluoride, fillings, and extractions.
