By James Matthews
The Haliburton County agency that delivers seniors’ dental care with the local public health unit will end its service agreement in January.
Dr. Natalie Bocking, the Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge District Health Unit’s medical officer and CEO, told the health board Nov. 21 that increased clients in a federal dental program for seniors has caused a drop in clients to the Ontario Seniors Dental Care Program (OSDCP).
“The clients they are seeing are now accessing that service through other dental care providers through the federal program,” Bocking said. “So it does not result in any recipients or clients losing service.”
The province established its seniors’ dental care program in 2019 and charged public health units with its delivery in collaboration with community health centres (CHC) and Aboriginal Health Access Centres.
If health units were to partner with external agencies, there was a need to draft service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure clear and consistent communication for the delivery of the program, funding, and reporting requirements.
Since the HKPR unit didn’t have a CHC in the north, Bocking said a unique partnership with Volunteer Dental Outreach of Haliburton (VDO) was explored.
“This program has been successfully implemented across the three sites since 2019 and recently the sites have seen changes related to the new federally funded Canadian Dental Care Program (CDPC),” according to a briefing note distributed to the unit’s board.
“The changes are positive in that more clients are enrolling in the CDPC program and sites offering OSDCP are seeing decreased enrollment in the program.”
And that’s why VDO intends to end delivery of the seniors’ program in January.
Seniors can be seen by participating dental providers for treatment through the federal program and, as such, the VDO wants to avoid taking away patients from those practices.
There are two dental practices in Haliburton Village, less than a five-minute drive from the VDO clinic, who are listed on the CDCP dental provider search tool, as accepting clients on this program.
Bocking said the VDO stated that they are helping clients sign up for CDCP and has confirmed that legally all clients rostered with them will continue to receive services by VDO and will not be turned away.
“I anticipate that the provincial program will continue to review their numbers given across the province people are accessing the federal program first and then the provincial one,” Bocking said.
