Children’s Dental Health
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Key Resources, Organizations & Funding Sources

• Treatment
• Volunteer Efforts
• Local Organizations & Collaborations
• Statewide Organizations
• Funding Sources
• Useful Internet Resources

Treatment

Access to treatment often comes down to how much the child's family or insurance can pay for care. For most children with private health insurance or the family resources to pay out-of-pocket, the access issues are not acute. For children with public health insurance or no insurance, a patchwork of treatment options may be available.

San Mateo County

Low-income children can receive treatment at any of the four county clinics. Clinics are in San Mateo, Daly City, Redwood City, and Menlo Park, and each serves about 10 children a day. The clinics do not perform sedation.

The Tooth Mobile (a private nonprofit) offers a range of dental care -- without sedation -- to several hundred publicly insured and uninsured children a year in a van currently stationed in the South San Francisco School District. Service may expand to East Palo Alto, Menlo Park, San Mateo, and Daly City, most likely only for the insured.

Children on the coast, who are either covered by public insurance or are low-income and uninsured, can receive treatment at Sonrisas Community Dental Clinic in Half Moon Bay, which serves adults and about eight to 10 children a day. Sonrisas, unlike many clinics for low-income families, does offer sedation, under limited circumstances.

The Ravenswood Family Health Center in East Palo Alto serves the uninsured. Services are provided there to Ravenswood patients only in the OnSite Dental mobile clinic, which also serves homeless families at shelters throughout the county.

Samaritan House in San Mateo offers dental services to clients' children under 12, one Saturday per month and periodically on weekdays. Some private dentists and hygienists offer pediatric care, but a limited number are trained to do so, and many limit the number of patients with public health insurance whom they will treat. Many are unwilling or not trained to sedate children under age 5.

As described above, a small, grant-funded program being piloted by the county and Sonrisas offers oral health education and treatment by doctor referral only to pregnant and post-partum low-income women eligible only for emergency Medi-Cal. This program springs from the growing body of knowledge linking maternal oral health to fetal and infant health, and is designed to improve the family's future oral health, as well.

Santa Clara County

Low-income children can receive care through three county clinics, which serve about 30 children a day (in East San Jose, on Tully Road in San Jose, and in San Martin). New clinics are slated to open in Gilroy and Sunnyvale in 2008.

Care also is available at the Gardner Family Health Network (serving about 40 children a day in downtown San Jose, East San Jose, and Gilroy); the Indian Health Center of Santa Clara Valley in San Jose; the Franklin-McKinley Dental Clinic (a school-based clinic serving about 10-12 children a day from throughout the county, with priority for children living in the Franklin-McKinley school district); a county mobile van that operates in Gilroy and North County (at the Mayview clinics in Palo Alto and Mountain View and Fair Oaks in Sunnyvale); the Health Trust's mobile van (serving about 2,000 children a year, currently stationed in Gilroy, with a planned move back to the Alum Rock/Mayfair neighborhood of San Jose later in the year); a Ronald McDonald van contracted with the county (visiting San Jose, Sunnyvale and Mountain View); or the Tooth Mobile van (serving about 1,800 children a year: children ages 0-5 in the Gilroy School District and children 0-18 in the Franklin-McKinley, Alum Rock, and San Jose Unified School Districts). The frequency and location of van visits changes from year to year, which can significantly alter the consistency of prevention and treatment services for children.

Several private group practices and individual dentists, primarily in San Jose, also accept public health insurance for low-income children.