The Iowa Mission of Mercy free dental clinic is coming to eastern Iowa in October. Iowa Dental Foundation Executive Director Laurie Traetow says they hold the event in a different area of the state each year.
“It’ll be the third time we’ve been here in Waterloo. The very first one was held here back in 2008,” she says. Dentists and hygienists donate their time to the event, which allows patients to show up and be treated for free. There are no appointments.
“The doors will open at 6 a.m. on Friday, October 13th and Saturday, October 14th. And we will treat patients until the clinic is full, so that you don’t necessarily say at closing time, Traetow says, “but we would encourage patients to come as early as possible.” They treat around 1,000 patients at each I-MOM event.
“They will go through what we call medical triage, We ensure that they are healthy enough for the dental care. And then they will move on to a dental triage area of the clinic,” she says. “And there they will work with a dentist to kind of look at what their needs are, they will get X rays there if needed. And the dentist will help prioritize what some of the needs are for them individually for that day.” She says the patient could need something as simple as a cleaning up to a root canal or filling.
They can also provide some partial dentures. “Say a patient is missing a front tooth and hasn’t smiled in a long time. They can actually leave the clinic that day, with a partial denture in place,” Traetow says. “And those are the fun cases because you see patients just smiling from ear to ear when it might have been a long time since we’ve been able to do that.”
Traetow says you can learn more about the event at the Iowa Mission of Mercy website.