Alexandra Chan discovered Friday that, especially in wet weather, stiletto heels are the wrong footwear for a ground-breaking. She has made more important discoveries in her first year overseeing dental care at the Hill Health Center — discoveries about what kids need.
Chan came from the Bronx to New Haven a year ago this month to oversee dental care at the community health center. Friday she greeted a crowd of muckamucks for a symbolic groundbreaking for a $2 million-plus, 3,000 square-foot addition to Hill Health’s dental department on Columbus Avenue.
Chan’s predecessor, Gwendolyn Testa (pictured), started working on such an expansion a good 10 years ago. Two state government agencies (social services and public health), the city, Connecticut Health Foundation and UnitedHealthcare came up with the money. The new space will enable Hill Health to serve 3,700 more people than the 12,900 dental patients it saw in 2006 at its various locations. It will be able to hire more dentists in addition to the pediatric dentist already on the job.
That’s a big deal: Poor families have trouble finding dentists in Connecticut, partly because of low Medicaid reimbursement rates. An estimated 300,000 children statewide receive little or no dental care.
Chan has seen that problem up close since arriving here last year. She worked with a similar population in her previous post in the Bronx. But finding dentists for people was easier there. Chan said Friday that she was surprised to find just how hard it was to find referring dentists for children or for adults needing specialized care.
Discovery number two: The number of children who don’t start seeing dentists until they turn 2 or 3 — by which time their mouths are a mess.
“I was astounded parents aren’t educated when their children are born,” Chan said. “I’m spreading the news that children should be seen at age 1. By 3 years you already have embedded habits.”
As a result, the children she’s seeing “come in with 20 teeth — and half are in decay.”
In addition to the expanded center at Hill Health’s Columbus Avenue headquarters, Chan has been working with the Board of Ed to expand the school-based clinic at Katherine Brennan out at West Rock into a community clinic.
Work had already begun on the expansion before Friday morning’s groundbreaking. The ground was dug up. Since it was raining, that made for tricky terrain for the symbolic shovelers like Chan. Especially for Chan. She wore three-inch stiletto heels. She realized it was a mistake.
“I sprained my ankle!” she said afterwards. Neither that fact, nor the weather, seemed to dampen her mood on a hopeful day for communal dental care.
