
{"id":12765,"date":"2010-09-23T08:37:52","date_gmt":"2010-09-23T16:37:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=12765"},"modified":"2010-09-23T08:37:52","modified_gmt":"2010-09-23T16:37:52","slug":"county-to-close-carr-mill-dental-clinic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2010\/09\/23\/county-to-close-carr-mill-dental-clinic\/","title":{"rendered":"County to close Carr Mill dental clinic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Susan Dickson<br \/>\n<\/strong><em>Staff Writer<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The Orange County Board of Commissioners voted 5-2 on Tuesday to close the county dental clinic at Carr Mill Mall and consolidate dental services at the county\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Hillsborough clinic. <\/p>\n<p>The Carrboro clinic will close effective June 30, 2011, when the county\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lease on the space expires. The county staffs part-time dental clinics at Carr Mill Mall and at the Whitted Human Services Center on West Tryon Street in Hillsborough, with the Carrboro clinic open two days a week and the Hillsborough clinic open three. Under the approved plan, the Hillsborough dental clinic will expand to serve patients five days a week when the Carrboro clinic closes. <\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153One of the things that we are aware of when we look at the map of points of where people receive services is that we have people from all over the county receiving services in Hillsborough, and that is not as true when you look at the Chapel Hill-Carrboro map,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d county health director Rosemary Summers said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153People are a little bit more hesitant to travel to the southern part of the county than they may be to the northern.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Summers said that the cost to lease the Carr Mill facility is $65,000 a year. To run two full-time clinics, costs to the county would total about $740,000, compared with about $500,000 for a single full-time clinic.   <\/p>\n<p>According to the county, the Dental Health Services Division of the county health department provided about 4,000 clinic visits and 6,235 dental screenings for pre-school and school-age children last year, including many for low-income and uninsured residents. Under the new plan, visits would increase to 5,100 annually. <\/p>\n<p>Commissioners Alice Gordon and Mike Nelson voted against closing the clinic. <\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I feel like we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re cutting past the bone, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve reached the point where I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t cut anymore. It just doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t feel like the right thing to do,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Nelson said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I would really prefer to work on this a little while longer.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/p>\n<p>Gordon said she was concerned that residents of the southern part of the county would not be able to get to the Hillsborough clinic.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know that we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve done enough to figure out what the impact is [on those receiving dental services] and how to mitigate it,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Gordon said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Low-income residents are not going to be able to get off work. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not going to have time to go to Hillsborough.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/p>\n<p>Summers said the health department would provide bus vouchers to patients who needed to travel from the southern part of the county to the Hillsborough dental clinic.<\/p>\n<p>Other commissioners said that while the decision was painful, the money wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t available to fund two full-time clinics. <\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Staff isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t going to be able to find $240,000 extra for us. If they could\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve, they would have,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Commissioner Pam Hemminger said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I think if we put [the dental services] all together &#8230; we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re going to serve more individuals in this county who need service than we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re serving now, except for the fact that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re going to be distributed differently.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153We need to do something. What we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re doing is not working,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she said. <\/p>\n<p>Commissioner Steve Yuhasz agreed. <\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The board of health came to the conclusion reluctantly but nonetheless necessarily that a single clinic located in Hillsborough that would be open five days a week that would serve all of the county would be the most effective way to provide dental service to the county at this time,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Yuhasz said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s important that we come to this decision.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Officials stressed that they hoped the single-clinic model would be temporary and added that they planned to have two full-time clinics open by 2021. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Orange County Board of Commissioners voted 5-2 on Tuesday to close the county dental clinic at Carr Mill Mall and consolidate dental services at the county\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Hillsborough clinic. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12765"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12793,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12765\/revisions\/12793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}