Formerly one of the general health clinics on the island, the East End Clinic, remodeled internally to some extent, is now serving Anguilla as a dental unit. This has been the case for several months now, following Hurricane Irma in September, 2017, which severely damaged the Dental Unit in The Valley, completely putting that facility out of operation.
The Anguillian newspaper asked the recently-appointed Chief Executive Officer of the Health Authority of Anguilla, Mrs. Maeza Demis-Adams, to comment on the new arrangement.
“Initially we had a slow uptake by the public, and a large part of that had to do with the fact that many persons were not aware that we had rehabilitated the East End Clinic to function as the Dental Unit,” she explained. “However, over the last couple of weeks we had a greater uptake of services and I guess that is what you saw when you passed there.
“We are encouraging persons to utilize that service at the East End Clinic – now the Dental Unit. Before the hurricane we had basically six chairs within our dental services. Post Hurricane Irma, when we re-established dental services, at the Welches Polyclinic, we were limited to only one dental chair for the whole island. That’s why the Management of the Health Authority made the decision to rehabilitate the East End Clinic to function as the Dental Unit and to incorporate an additional two chairs there.
“We are now functioning to half capacity which is three chairs. We are still currently working on getting mobile dental units, through the United Kingdom Government grant, to assist with providing services especially for the children of the island.
“Persons will be aware that many years ago we had mobile units going to the schools, and that programme was very successful. Each child of the island was seen at some point during the year. We saw from that data that up to when children went to high school their dental health was very impressive. Now, without having that service, we are seeing more cavities, and other detrimental dental diseases, because persons do not have access to dental services like when we had the mobile dental units. That is why we want to incorporate that mobile dental unit system into our dental services.”
Mrs. Demis-Adams continued: “The mobile dental units are custom built and normally they take about seven to eight months to be built, so we are still in the process of trying to procure them. We are hoping to procure two dental units to accommodate school-age children. Currently, we have one dental technician who normally deals with children, and we are going to look into hiring more dental staff later on.”
