Hyde County Dental Project: Providing Oral Healthcare in a Health Professional Shortage Area

Abstract

Hyde County is the second smallest county in North Carolina (NC) with a total population of 4,589 residents according to the 2020 census and a median household income of $46,667 (2). Hyde County, which connects to Beaufort County to the west, joins Tyrrell and Camden counties as the only three of North Carolina’s 100 counties with no practicing dentists within county limits. Additionally, many of the private practices in surrounding counties do not accept Medicaid/Medicare benefits and/or are not accepting new patients. Therefore, the East Carolina University School of Dental Medicine (ECU SoDM) has created the Hyde County Dental Project to provide Hyde County residents with access to oral healthcare through the development of the ECU Hyde County Outreach Clinic. The mission of the clinic is to provide oral health care in Hyde County once per month using portable dental equipment while integrating into the primary care system of health. Without this outreach clinic, Hyde County residents would need to travel 1.5 hours one way and be placed on a waitlist to be seen at the ECU SoDM Ross Hall location in Greenville, NC. A visualization of the distance between this location in Greenville and the outreach clinic can be seen in Figure 1 below. By addressing the community’s barriers to dental care, the project is meant to improve residents’ oral and systemic health as well as establish trust between the community and dental school through quality care and strong provider-patient experiences.