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A More Efficient and Progressive Dental Workforce is Needed in Meeting the Worlds Oral Healthcare Needs

Let’s start with the denturist profession. One thing more countries can do, including the United States, is regulate the denturist profession. Let denturists do the denture and partial procedures freeing up dentists chairtime for children, emergencies, and other restorative dental procedures. The denturist profession has been successful across Canada and in other countries. Denturists are on the front lines for oral healthcare, trained and educated in recognizing healthy tissue and when seeing something questionable, denturists are trained and educated in referral services. In most cases edentulous people dealing with disparities won’t step foot over the threshold of a dental office knowing that they can’t afford the services but will go into a denturist office.

The denturist profession spends time and resources, fighting for recognition and fighting for our right to serve those in need of our services which we have been trained and educated in. The education, training and formal recognition as a graduate and licensee of our profession gives us the right to serve and the American Dental Association has no right to keep us from serving. Here in the United States of America it is wrong for corporate ADA, a nonprofit organization, to use its membership dues to fight and lobby against the denturist profession which works to better the oral healthcare needs of Americans and rightfully so for the denturist profession throughout the world. The American Dental Association works against its own vision and mission statement by suppressing competition that has been trained and educated in providing dental and oral health care services to people with disparities.

Gary W. Vollan L.D.
State Coordinator; Wyoming State Denturist Assn., http://www.wysda.org
P.O. Box 332, Basin, Wyoming 82410, vollan@tctwest.net