Many years ago, while I was working at Kirk Hallam Dental Practice in Ilkeston providing oral surgery, a dentist and specialist in oral surgery named Karen Patterson came to visit me there.
She wanted to check out the new NSK oral surgery hand piece I was using because she was providing oral surgery in Nottingham and the practice were thinking of purchasing one.
It was a pleasure to meet Karen and I got to know her from that time onwards but most notably at that meeting she was explaining to me of her involvement in Bridge2Aid, which was a very young charity at that time providing training for clinical support officers in Tanzania.
She explained that she had travelled to Tanzania for a fortnight to provide training to local CSO’s to allow them to provide emergency dental care in their communities.
This training basically consisted of teaching the CSO’s to safely extract teeth and this really appealed me to. At that stage, extracting teeth was the thing that I did the most. I had always felt that Bridge2Aid was an ideal charity to be involved with because it suited my skill set and at some point, I would really be keen to go to Tanzania to try and help out.
At that stage I had 2 young children and since then I have had another child and at the moment it seems quite a difficult task to get 2 weeks to go to Tanzania to help out.
I was therefore delighted to see that they introduced the concept of the unity partnership and this was brought to my attention by Chris Barrow.
The unity partnership allows privileged people and practitioners like myself to be able to support the training of a CSO and their induction into providing emergency dentistry for their communities.
Clinical support officers are assisted by the Tanzanian Government and provide basic medical and dental care for extremely large communities who have no other access to local health care.
It’s hard to tell you how proud I was when I received the email from Shaenna at Bridge2Aid telling me that our CSO, Tukelage Mhema, had passed the 2 week course and was now able to go back to her community to provide emergency dental care.
Over 70% of the world’s population doesn’t have access to emergency dental care. It may not seem that helping someone to learn skills to extract diseased teeth in Africa will change the world, but I bet it will change the world of someone in Africa who has toothache.
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