Triodent customers help the needy

July 2010

Do dentists care? Judging by a Triodent effort to support dental aid workers in three very different parts of the world, the answer is absolutely yes.

We got an overwhelming response to a recent drive to collect unwanted sectional matrix retainer rings and matrices and those materials will now be used in Africa, Asia and the South Pacific.

Triodent has a history of supporting projects that improve access to dental care in poor areas, so when the company ran an incentive-based drive to collect dental practices' surplus rings and matrices, we were delighted by the response.

We selected four wonderful groups to benefit from the donations:

• Bridge2Aid has been providing oral health education and free oral health screening in schools and orphanages in the Mwanza region of Tanzania since 2002. In 2004 they opened the Hope Dental Centre which sees more than 280 patients each month and offers subsidized and free dental services to the poor.
• Marine Reach is the maritime arm of Marine Reach Ministries. They provide oral health care throughout Oceania. Recently they have been working in Fiji, providing not only dental care but also primary health care and physiotherapy.
• The Department of Community Oral Health is part of the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of the Western Cape. They provide an outreach program where their senior dental students travel to communities to help people who cannot easily access dental health care.
• We also provided rings and matrices to a group of UCLA School of Dentistry students who were making a dental mission to an orphanage in Yanjin, China.

Triodent CEO Simon McDonald said he was grateful to everyone who had made this assistance possible. "On behalf of the dentists who sent in supplies, Triodent would like to wish all of these organizations the best of luck for all the good work they do in Africa, China and the South Pacific," Dr McDonald said.