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A donation of nearly $300,000 will help a dental clinic for low-income Londoners increase its hours of operation, allowing it to help hundreds of more patients during the next two years, the donors say.

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Green Shield Canada, a health benefits provider, is donating $285,000 to the Wright Clinic at Glen Cairn Community Resource Centre, as part of a $20-million pledge to help improve access to oral health in Canada.

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The Wright Clinic, which opened in April 2021, performed more than 5,000 dental procedures and treated more than 300 emergency cases in its first 18 months of operations. The procedures include fillings, root canals, extractions and routine cleanings.

The additional money is meant to allow the clinic to extend its hours of operations, offering services in the evenings, between 5 pm and 8:30 pm, three more days a week.

The money will enable the clinic to help between 350 and 450 more clients in each of the two years of the partnership, said Mandy Mail, senior vice-president of marketing and communications at Green Shield.

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“We really want to make sure that the services they offer are even more accessible and increase the capacity so that they can help more people,” she said.

Ken Wright, the dentist after whom the clinic is named and one of its founders, could not be reached for comment Friday.

But in a recent interview with The Free Press, he said demand for services at the clinic that serves Londoners who meet the Statistics Canada low-income benchmarks has been intense since it opened.

According to Green Shield, nearly a quarter of Canadians put off oral care due to cost. Racialized Canadians, including immigrants and Indigenous people, are also more likely to avoid seeking dental services due to economic barriers.

Green Shield’s donation comes days after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced in London the start of the first phase of a new federal dental plan demanded by the federal NDP party as part of an agreement to support the minority Liberals on major legislation and 0 2 confidence votes.

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As part of the program, the government will give up households whose income is less than $90,000 and which don’t have private dental coverage $650 a year for each child younger than 12 for dental health.

The new benefit, which allows two visits a year plus additional care if needed, is expected to help 500,000 children during its first phase. The dental program will expand coverage to children aged 12 to 18, seniors, and persons living with in a disability 3 , with full implementation for all families with incomes less than $90,000 by 2025.

Mail said the funding Green Shield is making available is expected to help bridge gaps in service until the federal program is fully implemented.

“For us, the federal dental plan isn’t fleshed out yet and there’s a lot of unanswered questions,” she said.

“The intent is that it would replace the need for this (type of donation) but we want to make sure that it’s done correctly so that it can really add the benefits that it needs to for the right people.

“We are committed to making all of our investments in oral health to bridge the gap and access until the federal dental plan is fully implemented,” Mail said.

jjuha@postmedia.com

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