Creating Awareness
The JCB Foundation has created a powerful story in lectures and film to help educate students, educators, Dentists and the Healthcare Community at large in an effort to create solutions.
The film Hidden Pain: America's Oral Health Crisis will be presented in schools, associations and conferences.
This project will use social media to encourage all stakeholders in the community to take action in two areas:
- Increase access to affordable dental care in local communities by gathering funding from stakeholders.
- Political action to fight for adult dental coverage to be included in Medicaid and Medicare.
Developing A Workforce
The Need
Currently, there are not enough dental workers to service the population eligible to receive dental care. This will be a critical issue in the future, once more states add dental coverage through Medicare and Medicaid. The major challenges to finding new workers is the small population that has traditionally serviced the industry. To increase participation we must educate and recruit from all sectors of our economy.
The Plan
We intend to provide new Dental Professionals by leveraging government funding, charitable giving and Industry suppliers to cover tuition for new hygienists and assistants.
Tuition costs are the largest barrier to increasing participation and this is especially true in minority communities. Our focus will be to recruit from these communities and find ways to break down the barriers to employment.
Political action
By creating awareness and developing solutions, we hope to encourage both Federal and State governments to incorporate our mission into future plans. The cost of dental care is currently not covered in most states and there is no "private industry" model to make that happen. Ultimately, this is a problem the country faces together and can only be solved if we all work together to incorporate care into our National Healthcare discussion.