Our Work
Dominican Republic
The Dominican Republic is a small Caribbean country that shares the eastern half of Hispaniola Island with neighboring Haiti. In the Dominican Republic, low – income families have very limited access to health care and other basic services such as potable water, electricity and reliable emergency services.
10 Permanent Clinics
- Ten of our permanent clinics are located throughout the poorest densely populated areas of the Dominican Republic.
- The demand for our services is so great that several hours before the clinics open, the waiting rooms are already full of patients from the local communities and from far away towns.
Smiles Foundation and the Fundación para la Prevención y la Salud Bucal de Los Niños work together under the guidance of their Founder, Elina Katsman, to improve the health and well-being of disadvantaged people in the Dominican Republic through the “Sonrisas” Clinics. Since 1987, over 5.5 million Dominicans have benefitted from our dental and educational services.
CLINICS / DENTAL CARE
Used to deliver basic dental care in the poorest areas of the country, where the majority of its population has never seen a dentist before and shares one toothbrush in a family of 5-8 members.
Mobile clinics bring a spectrum of programs to remote rural areas and under-serviced urban communities including:
quality dental services and health promotion activities.
Strategically located clinics with 4 to 12 dental chairs in each, offer free dental care to children,
affordable dental care to adults and free primary health education to the communities.
EDUCATION / SOCIAL ENTERPRISE
Our dentists and health educators instruct the community about proper brushing and flossing. They encourage the patients to try the newly learned skills right then and there.
Smiles Foundation’s patients of all ages receive oral health information brochures and kits including toothbrushes, floss and toothpaste.
Our team educates the communities about:
- environmental protection
- prevention of domestic violence
- bullying
- children’s rights
- STIs prevention
- nutrition and other topics that emerge from the communities’ needs.
Children from low-income families in the communities we work in, feel at home in our clinics. We engage them in a variety of useful educational activities, including primary health care education and leadership skills development.
The English language is taught to youth and adults from our communities. This program is designed to improve its participants’ chances of employment and encourage continuous education.
UPCOMING
This network of services eliminate all the barriers to the dental services faced by the low-income families through the region.
Each one of our dentists can treat up to 15 children and 6 adults daily.
- Our statistics show that, in the Dominican Republic, an average 5-year old has 5 cavities and an average 12-year old has 8 cavities.
- Smiles Foundation clinics offer a full range of treatments including prophylaxes, sealants, whitening, fillings, crowns, bridges, dentures, endodontic and orthodontic procedures, dental surgeries, simple implant treatments and dental radiography.