LENS

Expanding Community Dental Care

New clinic building to provide enhanced services at patient-friendlier location

PHOTO: Daniel Milner

Kenneth B. Chance

Kenneth B. Chance, DDS (DEN '79), grew up in a Bronx, New York, neighborhood seeing intelligent, upstanding people judged, he said, "by the way they looked and not the content of their character" because they were missing teeth. That's why he decided to become a dentist: to help improve lives.

Now, as dean of Case Western Reserve's School of Dental Medicine, he's overseeing the development of an ambitious new clinic intended to bring more care to more people. That facility—slated to open in June—sits on the Health Education Campus, a joint project of the university and Cleveland Clinic. It is across the street from the new Sheila and Eric Samson Pavilion, where students from the university's dental, nursing and medical schools—including Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine—will be educated under one roof. The dental school's sturdy-but-aging clinic on the university's main campus served about 27,000 patients annually—both on-site and in the community.

The new clinic building has advanced technology and the ability to handle evermore complex cases. It also feels like a professional facility with its airy, light-filled spaces. Think magazine spoke to Chance about the new space—and its emotional resonance.

"The clinic is my dream—because we get the opportunity to really make a difference in people's lives," he said.*

3D printers with scanners where you can provide same-day dentistry or same-day prosthesis. If you want to construct a crown for the mouth, it can be constructed within one day with 3D, where [until recently] patients would have to make multiple visits. To have that technology available will be a game-changer for us.

IMAGE: Meshroom

This image of the Health Education Campus shows the School of Dental Medicine's new dental clinic straight ahead and the northwest corner of the Sheila and Eric Samson Pavilion on the right.

That's also a game-changer because Chester is a major thoroughfare and we'll have convenient, dedicated parking for patients. We're also in the historic Hough neighborhood, which is an underserved area not unlike the neighborhood that I was born in southeast Bronx. It's important to us that we're servicing many communities, particularly one that's within our grasp. We are not a clinic just for that neighborhood. We are a clinic that reaches many communities—those that are more affluent, those that are farther away than our school—but we take on responsibility for individuals who are in underserved areas.

On the first floor, there will be a faculty-practice clinic for complex conditions. Examples would be full-mouth reconstructions requiring a series of complicated procedures because of severe damage to hard and soft tissue. On the first and second floors, there are postgraduate specialty programs that train our residents who have already graduated from dental school to provide moderate to complicated care, such as complex root canals or replacement of missing structures in the mouth. On the third floor, our students in the DMD [Doctor of Dental Medicine] program will provide care for less-complicated conditions. That could include fillings and cleaning the teeth of patients who have gingivitis.

We received a gift from STERIS Corp. and STERIS Foundation for a world-class center that will provide the highest level of sterility and disinfection in any dental school in this country and rivals any hospital. It will be in the lower level [and will sterilize equipment and tools used in the clinic]. We also will have two ambulatory oral and maxillofacial surgical suites that will provide treatment benefits to the public like we've never had before.

*This interview was edited for length