Dentaid visit for Highlands dentist

Malcolm Hamilton spent a week in northern Greece treating refugees

05 April, 2017 / infocus
 Scottish Dental  

A special care dentist from NHS Highland has recently returned from a week-long Dentaid mission providing much-needed dental care to the residents of refugee camps in northern Greece.

Major Malcolm Hamilton, who is based at the Golspie Special Care Dental Unit in Sutherland, joined a team of four dentists, a hygienist and a nurse to work at the Health Point Foundation (HPF)-run camps. The team was assisted by two HPS clinic coordinators and two translators.

Malcolm said: “We treated more than 30 patients a day as well as providing OHI to the children in the school rooms. We prioritised sending our nurse and hygienist to the children so the dentists doubled up assisting each other.

“We provided a variety of treatments, extractions and extirpations being the most common but we also placed fillings and recemented bridges as well scaled some acute perio cases.

“The experience was very rewarding, the patients were all very grateful for what we could provide although one or two declined our treatment options as they wanted to wait until they were somewhere permanent to have a more definitive treatment.”

Malcolm explained that he has already started making plans to return next year. He said: “When I started fundraising towards this trip I was unsure exactly how much I would raise and set a low target on a crowd funding website. But to my surprise this was very quickly beaten and eventually folk had donated approximately twice what I had needed so I’ll not need to fund raise for my next trip.”

Tags: Dentaid / Highlands dentist / Malcolm Hamilton / Special Care Dentist

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