Salud Para La Gente (Salud) and Dientes Community Dental Care have collaborated to ensure the Beach Flats community will continue to access dental care. Starting June 1, 2017, Dientes Beach Flats Community Health Center, located at 302 Riverside Avenue in Santa Cruz will provide comprehensive dental services twice a week to uninsured and underinsured adults and children in Santa Cruz County in the same location previously occupied by Salud.
“With Dientes’s partnership Beach Flats patients will continue to get the dental care they need in their neighborhood,” said Marc Pimentel, Board Chair of Salud Para La Gente. “We are honored to partner with Dientes to serve these patients.” Medical patients have chosen to access Salud services at other locations or have been offered care through Santa Cruz County Health Services, Planned Parenthood or Santa Cruz County Community Health Centers.
Dientes’s needs assessment highlighted that only 30% of patients on Medi-Cal are going to the dentist. “When Salud brought to us the opportunity to provide care to the Beach Flats community, we knew we had to step in and help address the huge need,” explained Dientes Executive Director, Laura Marcus. She continued, “We are grateful to be able to work with Salud on this project.”
Salud ensures access to care to the whole community, regardless of insurance or ability to pay. Based in Watsonville, Salud is committed to a model that puts its patients at the center of care.
Dientes creates lasting oral health for the underserved children and adults in Santa Cruz County. With clinics in Santa Cruz and Watsonville and through a 35-location Outreach Program, Dientes provides nearly 35,000 visits to 10,000 patients annually, half are children.
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For more information about Salud, visit splg.org • For more information about Dientes, visit dientes.org • For information on the oral health need in Santa Cruz County, visit oralhealthscc.org
