Ron Gaudet with a patient and dental hygienist in the City Care Dental clinic.
Ron and Wendy Gaudet and their team have provided well over $600,000 worth of free dental work in Surrey / White Rock since 2017.
Working from a clinic in a 38-foot specially designed RV trailer, their City Care Dental program has helped hundreds of low income people.
They had not planned such extensive local work. Asked during an interview how they came up with the idea of a mobile dental clinic, Wendy responded:
We 100 percent stumbled onto it. Ron and I have done multiple missions trips, including India, Nepal, South America, Mexico, with different organizations.
Someone challenged us when they said, “You do this dentistry overseas, but what about the disadvantaged people in your own backyard?”
And I thought, we do a lot of pro bono in our practice, but this was a different group to help.
Loretta Hibbs from City Dream Centre had a vision for using a bus to deliver healthcare and she’d been praying about this when she got a call from the Alberta Dental Association saying they had two dental buses available.
Loretta was sitting at a pastors’ meeting beside the pastor that I was involved with in my overseas missions and the pastor suggested Ron and I might be interested in helping. We agreed to be directors and to help them get things up and running with the buses.
We started it from the ground up and jumped through all hoops to qualify the work as a non-profit. We did our first outreach clinic with a transitional home for women and then word got out and there’s not been a shortage of opportunities since. We receive both private and some government funding. I volunteer 100 percent, in terms of administrating the bus ministry.
Go here for the full 2023 interview with Katie Brouwer, then Dental Ministries Manager for Christian Medical & Dental Association of Canada (CMDA).
Our visit
Wendy Gaudet with Jacob Seward of City Dream Centre at Surrey Alliance Church.
Last Saturday morning (May 31) Tim Dickau, Director of CityGate Vancouver, and I visited the clinic, which was parked behind Surrey Alliance Church.
We began by talking with Wendy, who was overseeing a team of volunteers from the church (and two dogs) just inside the church.
Though not a dentist herself, she knows the field well. She taught pharmacology at UBC in the Faculty of Dentistry, as well as having served for a time as office manager for Wave Dentistry in White Rock, where Ron and their son Joel practice.
She keeps busy:
When Ron was going through cancer I decided to work with him at our practice. When he sold the practice to our son, I retired to work more with City Dream Centre. I also co-facilitate the Boundaries and soon the Parenting programs at the Fraser Valley Institute Women’s Prison.
Ron and Joel were out in the clinic, she told us, along with a dentist friend of Joel’s and several hygienists and dental assistants. Some of their volunteers are not believers, Wendy noted – “but they love it.” She added: “It’s really a strong core team.”
They work with students from schools adopted by City Dream Centre, as well as others in the neighbourhood on lower incomes. Among Wendy’s first words to us were that they love to transform a “smile that didn’t reflect what they were going into, it was from the past.”
She explained that the clinic is available one day per month, adding that they actually pack in 24 hours worth of work during that day, typically working with eight to 10 patients.
She wrote in a follow-up email:
We did a lot of dentures, crown and bridge when we had our two large grants from Peach Arch Hospital, and this allowed us to have one clinic month. Since then, we have accepted sponsorships that allow us to serve other communities in need, but these sponsorships fund single clinics and while we still can do a lot of dentistry, we do not have the follow-up clinic necessary to provide crown and bridge.
The clinic you were at for example was a single clinic sponsorship – but we did about $13,000 of free treatment even with no crown and bridge.
There is usually a waiting list of about 100 people.
In the clinic
The City Care Dental bus was parked right behind Surrey Alliance Church.
The clinic itself is bright and clean, with three chairs, one to the left and two to the right of the door.
Ron said, “It’s insane how many instruments you need” to deal with the wide range of situations they face, and they have tried to find room for them. “But you’re a missionary dentist,” he added. “You need to work with what you’ve got.”
He tries to maintain a very positive atmosphere in the clinic; he is comfortable interacting with a wide range of people from various cultures because of his missions experience. Still, language can be an issue and they do sometimes have translators on hand.
Asked during the CMDA interview about the patients the teams see, Wendy responded:
Let me tell you about Dave. He had a job at a hardware store and one day he came in and said he’d just been fired. He was working in the back of the store and came to the front just when a male customer came storming through and bumped a female customer’s purse.
David went up to the lady to help her get her purse back and she started to freak out. She thought David was a homeless person trying to steal her purse instead of a helpful employee. David’s boss fired him because of this incident.
I said, “Oh, Dave, we’re getting you teeth, that’s it.” He had dental phobias and fears, but we finally talked him through treatment and now he’s got full dentures and he can get a job. His whole image was changed.
There are so many people with different issues, like a single mom who was self-conscious because she was missing her laterals and had other chipped front teeth. We rebuilt her smile and it gave her so much more confidence and those are the kind of stories that just keep us going. It makes us realize, the dental team has an incredible ability to transform people’s lives.
It’s remarkable, it may seem to a dentist that it’s just what they do every day, but it really does make a difference for people who otherwise couldn’t afford to have that kind of care. We’re trying to step in and say, “we’re not going to pull a tooth out, we’re going to save it.”
We also do educational sessions with some of our seniors because a lot of our clients are low-income seniors. We try to help them manage coverage but often they don’t have benefits anymore, they’re not working, so they don’t have any dental insurance.
Essential service
Asked about provincial and federal programs which helped lower income people to access dental services, Wendy said they are valuable – but not enough to meet the many needs out in the community – “but there are still lots of holes” (so to speak).
She was interviewed for a CTV News story (March 22, 2022) about the federal government’s newly introduced dental care program for lower income Canadians:
Dr. Wendy Gaudet, the owner and manager of Wave Dentistry in Surrey, also runs a non-profit that provides free mobile dental care to low-income children at their schools.
She said, “I’m always going to advocate for better oral health services and coverage for people that are from low income families. I think that is absolutely necessary.”
But Gaudet worries the new federal program may operate like similar provincial ones, where the government only pays 30 to 50 percent of what an insurance company would for the same procedure.
“So what actually happens is people in these programs, when they try to access and get dentistry from private clinics, the dentists actually don’t accept them as clients because they get paid below the fee guide,” said Gaudet.
So she’s urging the federal government to pay the same dental fees that insurance companies and those without coverage do, to ensure people in the new program have no difficulty finding a provider.
“We want to definitely have equality and equal access to the same level and type of oral health care, no matter whether they are low income or high income,” Gaudet said.
Anjali is a young dentist from India. She is gaining local experience with City Care Dental while aiming for certification in Canada.
We were introduced to Anjali, a young dentist from India who is trying to become certified in Canada. Internationally trained dentists must pass a very difficult test or go back to school for further training.
Though she is not allowed to practice, she – and more than 10 others before her – have gained necessary experience at the clinic:
She helps in sterilization and can be a chairside assistant, but they are not certified. They have limited roles and work outside the patient’s mouth; for example they cannot take X-rays or put on a rubber dam.
They have thus been able to avoid expensive private alternatives.
Wendy acknowledges that City Care Dental should probably be more political, and focus more on pointing out how much they are benefitting both individuals and governments, but she also notes that everyone has a full-time job and they prefer to spend most of their time actually working with people.
Future plans
Wendy and Ron Gaudet plan to increase their time with City Care Dental when they ‘retire.’
Wendy said that when she and Ron ‘retire,’ they would like to be able to work much more often, possibly two days a week, at the clinic. Probably the greatest need in that regard would be a building, where they could just drive the bus and and know it was safe.
For now, they are hosted by various churches – Surrey Alliance, but also White Rock Baptist, Seaview Pentecostal and others.
At this point they have to store it in a field and fit it out each time they visit a church to do their work: “There’s a lot of packing and unpacking.’ Ron told me it was broken into more than once when it was parked on the street.
They would love to hear from any churches, businesses or ministries that could offer them steady use (or ownership) of a building.
The other obvious need, of course, is money. The work is provided for free, but each clinic visit still costs $5,000. They do receive some funding from the government, private sources and churches, but they would love to be able to provide more service.
They have had good support from groups such as Peace Arch Hospital Foundation, which has funded a good number of clinics, and Sources Community Resource Centre, which refers clients, including public school students. The BC Dental Association links to City Care Dental on its ‘Reduced Cost Dental Clinics in BC’ page.
Wendy said, “Village Church has been incredible,” sponsoring five clinics. She would love to see each church that adopts a school through City Dream Centre support one clinic.
They are hoping for even more involvement from the whole community – churched and unchurched: “At the heart of everything else is God.”
City Dream Centre
Loretta Hibbs is founder and board chair of City Dream Centre.
City Care Dental is an initiative of City Dream Centre, which Loretta Hibbs began to imagine after a visit to the Los Angeles Dream Center in 1996. It became a registered charity in 2016 and now has several focuses:
- Adopt a School Program: “City Dream Centre works with Surrey’s high needs schools and helps others in the community to get involved, providing support to more than 6,000 kids and their families every year, many of whom are living below the poverty line.”
- Food Security Programs: “City Dream Centre, in partnership with the churches and organizations that participate in our Adopt-a-School program, distributes thousands of food hampers yearly. Working with our adopted schools to identify families in need, we help keep nutritious meals on the table, allowing both kids and parents to focus on learning, working and reaching their goals.”
- Education Program: “Our Parenting course is a six-week, interactive course for those hoping to learn or rebuild the skills to improved parenting. With an awareness and sensitivity to the differences of our parenting experiences, course facilitators strive to create a relaxed, safe and encouraging atmosphere for all.”
- For the Love of Thrifting: “For The Love of Thrifting is a non-profit, beautifully designed, boutique style store, providing high quality new and lightly used clothing, accessories and home décor items. All proceeds fund the City Dream Centre’s mission and cause.”
Tim Dickau, Director of CityGate Vancouver, with Wendy and Ron Gaudet.
Tim Dickau and CityGate have been working to link groups which work with public schools – City Dream Centre, CityReach and Vancouver Urban Ministries, for example – in the Serve Our Schools network, “bringing together organizations and churches to alleviate poverty, food insecurity and enhance education in our local schools.”
Jacob Seward – who oversees the Adopt-a-School program for City Dream Centre and spoke at the most recent Serve our Schools gathering, at Broadway Church, May 1 – joined Wendy, Tim and me at Surrey Alliance Church.
City Care Dental used to offer hygiene events in public schools, but found them a bit ambitious. They believe the current clinic system allows them to “go deeper” with the people they serve.
Wendy said, “We really like to work with various community agencies, including the school board!”
Go here for an article about City Care Dental in Surrey Now-Leader; here and here in Peace Arch News.