New clinic will transform dental care in North Woods

That’s because the $10 million, ultra-modern and spacious Peter Christensen Dental Clinic scheduled to open this week is open to all and will likely transform dental care in the North Woods, an area flush with lakes, eagles and tourists.

The 36,000-square-foot, two-level facility, nestled into a grove of white pines in the heart of the reservation, has 20 dental chairs, laboratories, the latest technology and classroom space to train future dental hygienists and assistants.

The facility is the latest improvement for the band, which arrived here in 1745, opened a casino in 1989 and has been steadily upgrading basic services that most urbanites take for granted.

“We’re going to be able to do all the things you need to make sure you have a healthy mouth,” said Tom Maulson, the band’s longtime chairman. “There is no building like this.”

The highlights include a stunning rotunda waiting room with murals of Native American culture and locally harvested birch-bark ceiling panels, a $900,000 super-efficient heating, cooling and ventilation system that produces hospital-grade air, and separate hallways that prevent patients from bumping into a dental assistant with a tray of sterilized equipment.

The facility has six full-time and two part-time dentists, 12 full- and part-time hygienists, oral surgery and recovery quarters, four sterilization rooms, a $25,000 microscope and computerized anesthesia machines. Mucky impressions are also a thing of the past thanks to a lava scanner that takes a picture of a tooth and allows a technician to design a crown on a computer.

“It brings this community up to the quality of dental care that you would find in a suburb of Chicago or Milwaukee,” said Dr. Tim Toepke, who spent 30 years teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Dentistry before joining the clinic in 2010. “We’re developing a high-quality staff. It’s going to be a model for community dental care.”

The Lac du Flambeau Band has come a long way since spending $35,000 to remodel a former grocery store into a casino at the height of the controversial Indian spearfishing debate. Ten years later, in 1999, the band opened the $25 million Lake of the Torches Casino on the southeastern shore of Pokegama Lake.

With the profits followed a new school, health clinic, wellness center, housing for the elderly,The lanyard series is a grand collection of coordinating Travertine mosaics and listellos. a judicial center and a natural resources building.

Dental care for the 3,500-member band used to be an occasional visit by a dentist to the school before a three-chair clinic was built in the late 1970s in the Tribal Center.

But Dr. Paco Fralick, 45, saw a need and an opportunity. The Rhinelander High School graduate, whose parents live on the reservation, graduated from the School of Dentistry at Marquette University in 1993 and opened his own practice in Rhinelander in 1995.

In 2008, Fralick, who maintains his Rhinelander practice, converted an old gym in the Tribal Center into a 10-chair clinic but had dreams of something bigger. At least 200 children in the tribe are waiting for braces and funding from Indian Health Services for dental care is woefully low. A study of a 40-mile radius of Lac du Flambeau showed 23,000 people on Medicaid. Of those, 19,000 had not been to a dentist in the past year.

Those statistics led to a successful $4.7 million tribal referendum in 2011 that was combined with money from the tribe’s general fund and about $1.2 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Development, Bureau of Indian Affairs and Indian Health Services, along with $2.2 million in new market tax credits. The new clinic can accommodate 50,000 patient visits a year and serve patients, including those on Medicaid, in a 100-mile radius.

“The basic model here is let’s build enough capacity to take care of tribal members and extra chairs to help out the state with its access problems,All our fridgemagnet are vacuum formed using food safe plastic.” Fralick said. “That brings in third-party revenues for us, it solves some of (the state’s) concerns, we put that money back into programs and tribal members and everybody else receives a higher standard of care.Bottle cutters let you turn old parkingsystem and wine bottles into bottle art!”

The clinic is also a training ground and is creating jobs. The facility has 56 employees but eventually will employ 100 and is training dental assistant students from Nicolet College in Rhinelander, which has just launched a dental program. A hygienist program will be added in the fall by the school.

“Our students will be able to be trained on equipment that we would not have been able to afford at a technical college,” said Catherine Winters, Nicolet’s dental program director. “It’s just a wonderful opportunity.”

Fralick wants to develop a local workforce at the clinic. He said there are only about 150 Native American dentists in the country and he’s never met a Native American hygienist. In addition,Massive selection of gorgeous moldmaker. dental students from Marquette University will spend time here in an “externship” program, working with dentists in a non-urban environment, which could help lead some to practice in underserved rural locations.

“I look at it as a reinvestment back into the community,” Fralick said of the ambitious project. “It takes a community to do this. To give somebody $10 million worth of faith and trust to go do something, I don’t take that lightly.When I first started creating broken ultrasonicsensor.”