![]() Students from Cizik School of Nursing help veterans fill out medical history forms, which can help avert life-threatening complications during treatment. ![]() ![]() Faculty, residents, and students work together to ensure every veteran truly leaves with a smile. I tell them it’s more than just an opportunity to get your teeth cleaned, and that oral health can affect the whole body.” A team effort makes Give Vets a Smile successful. I make sure everybody at our housing community knows,” he says. She now has help from veterans like Sneed, who works at U.S. The event begins with Pullis getting the word out to community veterans. campaign, community donors including Delta Dental Community Care Foundation and Amegy Bank have stepped in to help grow the program from a simple focus on pain relief to a range of oral health services offered by students, residents, and faculty from the School of Dentistry and Cizik School of Nursing. In the years since and throughout the Many Faces. “But we had a great response and ended up seeing about 90 patients.” “That first year, we were basically on a shoestring budget because no one knew us yet,” says Pullis, who worked with U.S. Together, they launched the first Give Vets a Smile event in 2015. Melchor, EdD, RDH, Associate Professor and Director of Community Outreach at the School of Dentistry, to determine if the schools could cooperate to leverage the talent of their faculty and students. Many of the veterans Pullis encountered suffered from years of drug abuse that wrought severe damage to their oral health and left them missing teeth-a handicap in trying to find a job. Vets, an organization dedicated to ending homelessness among veterans. Pullis, whose father served in the Naval Construction Battalion (commonly known as “Seabees”) during World War II, saw the urgent need for dental care during her work with homeless veterans through U.S. Pullis, PhD, RN, Associate Professor, who leads the Veterans’ Bachelor of Science in Nursing program at Cizik School of Nursing and helped start Give Vets a Smile. “When we ask veterans how long it has been since they had dental care, some will say decades,” says Bridgette R. While the United States Department of Veterans Affairs offers a broad range of health services to veterans, only those who were prisoners of war or have certain degrees of service-related disabilities qualify for dental benefits-roughly 13% of veterans. Yet many veterans living in poverty-especially those experiencing homelessness-never receive such timely interventions or even basic oral care. “Some vets come in and find out there’s more going on than just a toothache,” Sneed says. Students, residents, and faculty from the School of Dentistry and Cizik School of Nursing at UTHealth Houston staff the event from start to finish. Sanchez caught Sneed’s infection-which, if left untreated, could have spread throughout his body-at Give Vets a Smile, an annual event at the School of Dentistry where veterans receive free oral health screenings, preventive care, or urgent care. “He had a dental infection that he didn’t know was there,” says Lauren Sanchez, DDS, a second-year resident at UTHealth Houston School of Dentistry. That pride keeps him motivated to care for his oral health, but this time something dangerous slipped past his notice. As Army veteran Danny Sneed tells it, his smile is his style.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |