LOS ANGELES — On a Thursday morning inside a multipurpose room, mental health came face to face with dental health. However, Zane Grant, who is a nurse practitioner at Gateways Hospital, said the search for willing dentists was not easy.

“There’s a stigma with psychiatric patients sometimes. I’ve cold called lots of dental places, even asked my own dentist,” he said.

Until finally, folks at the Chinatown Service Center (CSC), a local community health clinic, volunteered to come to Gateways Hospital and Mental Health Center in Echo Park to provide around 40 patients with basic dental care.

“Most of our patients we’ve seen so far haven’t seen a dentist in, most of them don’t remember. I think this is a nice baseline or jumping off point,” said Dr. Noel De Leon, one of the two volunteer dentists along with eight dental assistants from Chinatown Service Center. 

The patients were first shown how to properly brush. Then, they received oral cancer screenings and a fluoride treatment.

“Normally, we would just take patients who are having pain or an infection, we would have to take them to a dentist off-site, which is a difficult task because we’re a locked facility,” Grant said.

Here, the bigger focus is on preventative care, helping to convince at-risk patients to visit a clinic before small problems become irreversible ones.

“If you’re dealing with psychiatric issues and then you’re also having pain, chronic pain, infection, things like that, it’s just so important that those things are treated. Otherwise, it’s just going to be so much harder,” Grant said.

But because Gateways primarily serves the uninsured and formerly unhoused, finding appropriate and confident services for the mentally ill can be challenging.

“Most of our patients will go to the dentist and probably more time than not, instead of treating the problem, they’ll just pull the tooth,” said Dr. Phil Wong, CEO of Gateways Hospital and Mental Health Center.

But Gateways says it is committed to treating the whole person, especially as the transition from in-patient to outpatient care has taken longer in recent years because there isn’t room for them.

“There’s a kind of bottleneck for step-down placement and long-term housing just because of the crisis in Los Angeles,” Grant said.

Making access to dental resources available for the most vulnerable patients even more critical.

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