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Pati Daigle (right) and Kat Stoner (left) chat with Lorena Cadet about the work they are doing on her teeth at a recent Living Water community clinic in Locust Grove.
Executive Director Debbie McGinnis and Reverend Adam Colson led the expansion of the Living Water Community Clinic.
Dr John Sellers (right) and Pati Daigle (left) fill a cavity for Darlene Rochford of Lake of the Woods at the Living Water Community Clinic in Locust Grove.
The Living Water Community Clinic offers free medical, dental, emotional and spiritual care.
The chairs are new, the equipment is state of the art and in some cases better than what clinicians have in their own offices.
After investing more than $ 108,000 from fundraising and individual donations and grants from local clubs and businesses, the Orange County Living Water Community Clinic opened a new dental clinic in May.
Living Water is a ministry of Lake of the Woods Church and provides all types of care, including physical, mental and spiritual, to uninsured residents of Orange, Spotsylvania and Culpeper counties who meet income criteria. The organizers realized, soon after they started providing medical assistance in 2016, that there was a great need for dental services as well.
“Oh, my God, for many patients their greatest need was dental,†said Liz Sullivan, a family nurse practitioner who has volunteered at the clinic since the beginning. “They came with sore mouths, damaged teeth, tooth abscesses, fractured teeth that they had had for months and there was nothing we could do for them.
It wasn’t hard to see why so many patients hadn’t seen a dentist for 20 years, if ever.
“The majority of people, when you live day to day and day to day, your dentist is often one of the last things you’re going to spend money on,†Sullivan said.
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