Duluth, Nov. 21 – The Minnesota Department of Health and its rural health partners awarded its prestigious 2024 Rural Health Team Award to the Sawtooth Mountain Clinic’s Oral Health Task Force (OHTF). The OHTF team will be honored during the 2025 Minnesota Rural Health Conference in Duluth June 9-10, 2025.
The OHTF works to provide dental care, regardless of income, to every child to age 26, every pregnant woman and every senior over 65 years in Cook County and on the Grand Portage Reservation.
The hope behind that goal: To prevent unnecessary human suffering caused by a lack of affordable and available dental care.
Little more than a decade ago, hundreds of children in Cook County and the Grand Portage Reservation were getting little or no dental care for a number of reasons: Transportation was difficult to the county’s only dental clinic, parents and children both lacked an understanding of the importance of dental health, and it was too expensive. In 2011, Dr. Alyssa Hedstrom, DDS, owner of Grand Marais Family Dentistry, was moved to act when a child told her, “I know my teeth are rotten, but my parents can’t afford to get them fixed.” At the same time, Paul Nelson, then VP of the North Shore Health Care Foundation, observed a child at school weeping because of tooth pain but with no avenue for relief except the hospital’s emergency room for pain killers.
Alyssa and Paul joined forces and organized a group of volunteers to form the Oral Health Task Force (OHTF). Through grant funding and in-kind contributions, the OHTF developed a program to ensure every child in the county received dental care regardless of family income. Today, the OHTF provides free preventive dental care and pays 90 percent of the cost for restorative care to 750 Cook County and Grand Portage children. It also has expanded its program to cover up to 90 percent of restorative dental costs for young adults, expectant mothers and seniors aged 65 or older.
The SMC adopted the OHTF four years ago to make dental care in Cook County sustainable and to strengthen the link between medical and oral health.
The OHTF is made up of 9 medical, dental, social services and educational volunteers who meet once a month to monitor the program’s success and suggest ways to improve services. Two task force members – Jennifer Sorenson, Director of Grand Portage Health Services and Educator Shannon Redbrook from the Kina Native American program at the University of Minnesota Duluth Medical School – joined forces with Oral Health Task Force Educator and Hygienist Bonnie Dalin to increase dental care at Grand Portage via school screenings and produced four K-5 children’s dental comic books and expectant mothers pamphlets in Ojibwe and English. Dalin also helps teachers with monthly oral health classroom lessons at the Oshki Ogimaag Charter School and Head Start program.
Every day, the OHTF works hard to improve and sustain the dental health of Cook County and Grand Portage residents who lack the resources to do it on their own. With extensive oral health education and by making dental care affordable, the OHTF team continues to reduce young people’s cavities and provide restorative care for them, for young adults, expectant mothers and seniors.
The results are good: Compared to the state’s average cavity rate for children of 55%, the OHTF has reduced cavities in local children to 7.6%.
“The OHTF has made a great effort in our school and community by offering oral health screenings, education and outreach to our students and families. It has been an effective collaboration which serves our community in ways that help overcome many of the barriers found in our isolated and economically challenged setting. The OHTF has done some amazing work. I’m hopeful the OHTF will continue to receive funding to support current partnerships and extend into other unmet areas. Adequate preventive care is a largely unmet health concern for many, and we are grateful that the OHTF is helping bridge that gap.” Carmen Keyport, Executive Director, Oshki Ogimaag Charter School.
About Sawtooth Mountain Clinic
Sawtooth Mountain Clinic has been a community health center for 45 years. Our mission is to provide access to high-quality, patient-centered, primary and preventative healthcare for all persons throughout SMC’s service area of Cook County Minnesota and the Anishinaabe Nation of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, on whose ancestral tribal lands we stand.
