Gallatin Community Clinic opens dental facility

By KAYLEY MENDENHALL, Chronicle Staff Writer

Ever since Community Health Partners opened a dental clinic in Bozeman, the phone has been ringing off the hook.

"For a while there we were getting 100 calls a day," said Kaley Schuman, administrator at the clinic in the Beaver Pond Plaza on West Main Street. "Now every morning there are 30 to 40 messages on the voice mail. I get 20 to 30 more calls throughout the day."

Most of the calls are inquiring about the same thing -- affordable dental care for people with little or no health insurance.

"A good portion of the people have not had dental care for quite a while," Dr. Tim Lang, the full-time dentist working at the clinic, said. "We're seeing 10 to 14 patients a day. A lot of it is people who do not have dental insurance."

The clinic opened about a month ago and is part of Community Health Partners' mission to increase dental care for under- and uninsured patients.

Community Health Partners is a nonprofit based in Livingston that opened the Gallatin Community Clinic in Bozeman several years ago through federal funding. Both of those clinics focus on low-income medical care and charge patients based on a sliding fee scale determined by household income levels.

Fees for dental services at the new clinic will be assessed the same way as at the medical clinics, said Buck Taylor, director of the Gallatin Community Clinic. To receive a reduced charge, patients have to prove their income by bringing in pay stubs or other documentation.

"It's really a dream come true to have a free-standing dental clinic for this county and for Park County too," Taylor said. "We're hoping down the road to have a service site in each county."

For now, Lund is seeing patients from both Gallatin and Park counties, until a facility can be built in Livingston. The current Gallatin County location is also temporary, as plans are in the works to construct a new site behind Family Doctor's Urgent Care on North 19th Avenue this fall.

"Having a dentist who's focusing on those patients on a full-time basis, I think will be a tremendous benefit to people who are having difficulty paying for dental care," said John Nordwick, CEO of Bozeman Deaconess Hospital.

The hospital has helped fund the low-income dental program by donating equipment and helping the clinic find a location. Through the years, the hospital has also been involved with the Gallatin Community Clinic's dental alliance -- a group of local dentists who took turns seeing uninsured patients with emergency dental problems.

That alliance will continue to meet, Taylor said, and act as an advisory council to the new dental clinic. The alliance will no longer see patients.

"We do see this as a huge, huge need, especially for our population," Taylor said.

When dental problems are ignored, Nordwick said, they become serious health concerns and often land people in the hospital.

"You have people who end up in the emergency department or end up seeing physicians in the community," he said. "If they had dental care, it wouldn't get that far."

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