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Minnesota Department of Health honors Sawtooth Mountain Clinic dental program with 2024 Rural Health Team Award

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.

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