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UF’s Hialeah Dental Clinic Celebrates Its 10th Anniversary

“Cepillar y usar el hilo dental diariamente!”

This is the refrain commonly heard at the University of Florida College of Dentistry’s Hialeah Clinic, and in whatever language you say it, brushing and flossing daily are the keys to good oral health. Opened in 1997, the clinic serves the dual mission of providing reduced-fee dental care to Miami-Dade County’s low- to moderate-income residents and a training facility for dental students in the college’s Advanced Education and Foreign Trained Dental programs.

The vision of the Hialeah Clinic became a reality due to the collaboration among Hialeah Hospital, the City of Hialeah, state legislators, University of Florida, and leaders within the south Florida dental community. Hialeah Hospital donated property with a building to house the clinic—right across the street from the hospital on east 25th Street. Frederick H. Marinelli, the city’s director of grants and human services, penned a winning $1 million federal grant proposal to fund renovation and expansion of the clinic building.

“Why did we work so hard to get this clinic in Hialeah?  It just comes down to the state, city, private sector and academia coming together to achieve something good for our residents,” said Marinelli.  “It fulfills an important need in our community.”

Today the clinic is a model for quality dental education with laboratory facilities and central sterilization. It has recently installed digital radiography and a large conference room for in-house seminars and distance learning. The clinic provides patients with low-cost comprehensive oral care—offering diagnostic services, preventative dentistry, operative dentistry, pediatrics, prosthodontics, endodontics, periodontics, orthodontics, and oral and maxillofacial surgery.

With more than 85 percent of the clinic’s patients speaking Spanish as their primary language, dentists at the clinic know the importance of bridging potential communication barriers to develop trust in the patient-doctor relationship.

“Our Spanish-speaking patients are much more comfortable with doctors who can converse with them in their native tongue. They appreciate the fact that our staff and most of our dentists are bilingual,” said Roberta Diehl, D.D.S., the clinic’s director.

Besides providing dental service, the Hialeah Clinic is also known as the training ground for the Advanced Education in General Dentistry (AEGD) and Internationally-Educated Dentist (IEDP) programs at UF. In the past decade, the clinic has conferred nearly 150 dental certificates from the two programs. Each year, eight internationally-trained dentists and four dental residents receive training at the clinic and many of them are from Caribbean and Latin American countries. The IEDP graduates later apply for board licensure to practice in Florida and help provide better access to dental care for the state’s growing and culturally diverse population.

Uf’s Hialeah Dental Clinic could not have prospered without the support from the clinic’s courtesy faculty—62 dentists with private practices in the community.  These courtesy faculty play a critical role in helping the clinic accomplish its service and teaching missions: they donate time to caring for patients—often referring them to the clinic from their own practices—and mentor dental students.

“I think its one of the greatest experiences you can have in your life, to teach people from abroad and contribute to their education,” said Aquiles Mas, D.D.S., one of the clinic’s founding supporters, courtesy faculty and clinic advisory board member.  “You are bonded with them for life.”