Lawmakers haven’t yet agreed on how to solve New Mexico’s healthcare worker shortage through legislation, but one approach could be to get providers to put down roots here by enticing them to train here.
That’s the hope of the founders of Touro Dental Health New Mexico, which is scheduled to officially open in Albuquerque on June 4.
According to its website, the school will be New Mexico’s first pre-doctoral dental school clinical training facility.
It’ll be the sister school to Touro College of Dental Medicine in New York, and located on the campus of Albuquerque’s Lovelace Medical Center.
Dental students will spend two years in clinical training at the Albuquerque school after spending the first two years focused on classroom studies on the Hawthorne, NY campus.
If all goes according to plan, before the end of June, that first group of future doctors won’t just be studying, they’ll be seeing patients.
In an interview with KSFR, Touro’s director of clinical education, Jennifer Oki, said when it reaches full capacity, the school will be a bustling treatment facility.
“ It's going to be a very big clinic. It's going to kind of run like a dental hospital, really." Oki said.
"So we'll have, by the time we're fully open, we're going to have four general practice clinics, each with 50 students in them providing general dental care, including fillings and cleanings, crowns.”
The school’s faculty will be will be the specialists, providing patients with more involved treatments such as root canals, extractions, and implants.
Oki said the school has hired 33 professors so far, with 29 of them hailing from New Mexico.
Born in Hawaii, Oki and her husband have been running a dental practice in Albuquerque since 2011.
She earned her dental doctorate in Boston.
Even though she eventually moved to New Mexico, Oki said that data indicates that dentists usually stay near the institutions where they acquired their doctoral degrees.
“ It's been shown that where you go to school tends to be where you stay in practice," Oki said.
"So hopefully we'll get some native New Mexicans to go to the school and then stay and practice in New Mexico."
There’s no one from the state in Touro’s first Albuquerque cohort of 100 students.
There is one New Mexican slated for next year's group, when the program reaches its capacity of 200 student dentists on campus.
Oki said Touro is working with the University of New Mexico to increase recruitment from within the state.
But going to dental school isn’t cheap, regardless of where you're from.
Tuition and fees over the four years at Touro dental school averages about $95,000 per year.
But while the school is short on home-grown students at its launch, it will almost immediately deliver on expanding the state's dental offerings.
Touro refers to studies that indicate the number of dentists per 100,000 people in New Mexico is about 48.
That's well below the national average of about 61 dentists per 100,000 people.
Having 100 dentists-in-training available to see patients this year and 200 next should help take away the sting of those figures.
The practice of students providing quality care is common at dental schools, but the sessions with pre-doctoral students tend to run longer, Oki said.
"It's going to be a very different experience than you're going to get in a private practice."
"Your first exam is gonna be about two hours, and you'll come back and have another two-hour appointment where you get your treatment plan done. You're not going to get your filling done in half an hour like you could somewhere else. And so to offset that we definitely make those fees lower, make it more affordable, to kind of balance that out."
There are also plans, Oki said, to have Touro dentists provide free care during special events each year, one for children, and one, around November, for veterans.
