Building a bridge for dental care access and training

Students in the School of Dentistry gain invaluable clinical experiences while serving diverse communities across the region.

For students in the U of M’s School of Dentistry, community engagement is embedded in their curriculum and career preparation. All students in the last year of their dental, dental hygiene, and dental therapy programs participate in community outreach rotations through the school’s Division of Community Outreach and Engagement.  

The rotations help students apply what they’ve learned in school—both in classroom and clinical settings—and bring that into the community so they can gain clinical experience, increase their confidence, and improve speed and efficiency, says Angie Hastings, director of Community Outreach and Engagement for the school. 

They also learn the challenges various communities face, how to holistically treat patients, and how to "thoughtfully and respectfully engage communities, especially those that are facing health inequities," says Hastings. All of the student-provided dental services are overseen by faculty of the School of Dentistry. 

As the program has evolved, it’s now able to match students according to their geographic areas of interest or other student requests, Hastings says. The school has partnered with 21 affiliate clinics in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota, and with the Mobile Dental Clinic (owned by UCare), featured in this video.

Download video transcript

On a snowy, blustery Halloween afternoon inside Immanuel Lutheran Church in Eden Prairie, dental student Mitchell Hruska took a break to discuss his experiences at the Mobile Dental Clinic—his third community outreach rotation—parked just outside the window.

"I’m working on a bus; I’ve never experienced anything like it," he says with a grin. "I would say that’s probably the most unique aspect is that we’re going to the patients rather than the patients coming to us."

"The bus provides us with the ability to work with these underserved communities, to work with people who don’t typically see a dentist," he adds. "I have multiple patients [for whom] it’s their first time ever seeing a dentist. And it’s not because they don’t want to see a dentist, but because of the difficulty they have accessing that care."