Dr. Gregory Stoute Shares Affinity for Oral Health Missions with Students

From June 13 to 19, Associate Professor and Director of Minority Affairs Dr. Gregory Stoute traveled to Westmoreland Parish in Jamaica with 2010 DMD graduate Esther Lim. Dr. Lim is one of several students who have accompanied Dr. Stoute on an oral health outreach mission in recent years. Dr. Stoute has been involved in various outreach efforts worldwide for the last 30 years including trips to the Caribbean, South Africa, and South America.

This particular mission was organized by Jamaica Awareness Association of California (JAAC), an organization that Dr. Stoute has worked with since 2007. In addition to dental professionals, JAAC also arranges for physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and educators to travel together to parishes in Jamaica to provide care to underprivileged Jamaican adults, who otherwise would not have access.

As part of the JAAC outreach team Dr. Stoute and Dr. Lim provided preventative care, cleanings, and extractions to approximately 130 patients over the course of five days. They worked well as a team, each taking on some aspects of the treatment, and overcame the challenge of only having one chair to use in each of the two clinics that they visited.

"In Jamaica even people who have jobs—the working poor—are in many cases unable to afford dental care," said Dr. Stoute. "At one point in the trip many workers from the hotel we were staying at came in for a dental visit. Like so many nations, including the U.S. and even Massachusetts with the recent MassHealth coverage cuts, working people just do not have access to care."

Dr. Stoute also thinks that outreach missions are a wonderful learning experience for students. Most notably the experience they gain from using an elevator as opposed to hand piece when performing extractions and from needing to utilize the basics concepts of anatomy since no x-rays are available to assist with extractions. He recalled how two third-year DMD students who had traveled with him on a prior outreach mission displayed impressive skills during their oral surgery rotation to the amazement of their instructors.

Photos from the trip, complete with Dr. Lim’s captions, are available on GSDM’s flickr account and also the Facebook page.