A Brush Up On The Toothbus

If you're out driving the backroads of Western North Carolina this spring or next fall, you could run up on an unusual looking RV. You won't miss it should you cross its path. The 40-foot-long vehicle is brightly colored and bears a vanity license plate reading TOOTHBUS.

The Toothbus, as the name suggests, is a mobile dental unit with two dental chairs, an X-Ray machine, a lab, and the requisite drills and tools. It is part of an outreach program operated by the Ruth and Billy Graham Children's Health Center at Memorial Mission Hospital in Asheville. Launched in 1996, the mobile dental program provides care, both preventive and restorative, to children of low-income families in Western North Carolina.

On the day that we visited the Toothbus at Deyton Primary School in Spruce Pine, a second grader named Jimmy came in complaining of a toothache. "My tooth's hurting," Jimmy said while clutching his jaw. Dentist Jim Reed and two assistants attended to him and offered some relief. Jimmy is just one of many children in this remote mountain region who get much-needed dental care from the Toothbus. "It's been a godsend for this area and for some of the children who have never seen a dentist before," says Susie Carpenter, the teacher's assistant who brought in Jimmy. In its first four-and-a-half months of operation, the ToothBus treated 230 kids, according to Monica Teutsch, the program's manager back at Mission Hospital. Most were around age 7, and many had to come back more than once. "These are kids who have no other access to dental care," she says.

The need for children's dental care in rural North Carolina may be much more of an issue than you would think. The Graham Children's Health Center had initially set out to provide mobile immunization services for children, but after talking with local public health departments and area health-care providers, the center found that dental care for kids was the number-one need.

Nearly a quarter of the kids seen during the Toothbus's start-up were in pain when they were seen; three-quarters came in with untreated decay. "It's as much an education program as it is a drill-and fill program," says Reed, the dentist who attended to Jimmy. "One of the main goals is to increase awareness. It's really a lot of parents' first experience with modern dentistry."

So if you should see the Toothbus on your roamings through the Western part of our state, give it a toot of your horn and a thumbs up for a job well done.