Affordable Dental Clinic for Low-Income Adults to Close

(Port Angeles) — A dental clinic that helps low income residents locally is closing.

OlyCap will close its oral health services clinic that operated in Port Angeles due to funding issues.

It was a partnership between the social aid agency and Peninsula and Pierce colleges.

Patients would pay a sliding fee for services that were provided by volunteer professionals and students that were training to become dental hygenists.

But OlyCap’s Tim Hockett says they will have to close the program at the end of next month.

The OlyCAP Oral Health Center provides dental care, hygiene services and dental education to low-income, uninsured people.

The Center’s dedicated staff covers the full scope of primary dentistry.

Many local dentists volunteer at the clinic and several times a year the Olympic Peninsula Dental Society partners with OlyCAP to sponsor “Give a Kid a Smile” programs.

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OlyCAP also operates a mobile dental service regularly visiting Forks, Port Townsend, Clallam Bay and Brinnon.

Every year, OlyCAP provides dental services to over 1500 low-income, uninsured people in nearly 4000 appointments. Our services extend across the peninsula.

He says it will stay closed until OlyCap learns if it gets status as a federally qualified health center, which would allow it access to different funding.

Hockett says OlyCap had been able to keep the clinic open by supplementing the budget from other sources, but there’s not enough money to continue doing that.

Last year, the clinic had more than 55-hundred appointment and treated more than a thousand emergency dental issues.

Hockett estimates it provided nearly one and a half million dollars in care, but only collected about 365-thousand dollars due to the low-income patients’ ability to pay

Sources: konp.com, olycap.org