by Rebecca Rakoczy

 

A dental chair at NASCAR?

 

Sure.

 

For the past 17 years, Cherie Rainwater has spent her Labor Day weekend at a NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) event at Atlanta Motor Speedway, joining her dental hygiene colleagues and students from Georgia Perimeter College, as well as dentists and ear, nose and throat doctors. Amid the roar of the race, they screen for oral and throat cancers. Over the years, they have provided care for hundreds of race attendees and detected serious health issues.

 

It’s not a typical way of approaching dental education, but Rainwater, director of GPC’s Dental Hygiene department, wants to make sure her students think outside the dental office. The Atlanta native sees career opportunities in caring for underserved populations—and that means meeting patients where they are.

 

“The majority of students come into the dental hygiene program thinking they will work in a private practice in metropolitan Atlanta, but that’s not feasible to think that everyone can do that in these economic times,” she says. “One of my personal goals is that I want to lead students to find their passion for some of these out-of-the-box practices they can go to.”

 

For Rainwater, that passion can mean working for a clinic that cares for developmentally challenged individuals, the aged or others who might not have easy access to dental care. Exposing students to a variety of different patient populations—even if they do end up working in a traditional clinic—is important to broaden their experience in the real world, she says.

 

Rainwater speaks from personal experience; although she worked in private practice when she first started out as a dental hygienist, she was invited to work for Oral Health America as a team educator for the Georgia Spit Tobacco Education Program, traveling middle Georgia. The program was funded by a grant.

 

“I was privileged to work with minor league sports teams, churches, civic organizations and a lot of health-care professionals,” she says. “When the grant was up, I started teaching in a dental hygiene program and then became the clinic coordinator.”

 

That was at Central Georgia Technical College in Macon.

 

At GPC, the foundation for caring for underserved populations at the Dunwoody Campus-based Dental Hygiene Clinic already had been set by GPC instructors such as Pam Cushenan before Rainwater came on the scene, Rainwater says. When she arrived at Georgia Perimeter last July from West Georgia Technical College, she already had encountered the deep sense of community service the GPC dental hygiene faculty shared.

 

“We have some different populations that come to our clinic, and we’re working on building relationships with others,” she says.  Dental hygiene faculty members take students to work directly with these populations—such as taking dental care directly to senior day care facilities in the area.

 

A mother of two—and grandmother of four—Rainwater wants to extend her love of volunteering with special populations to GPC students. “My parents were great examples and taught us to give and help others by volunteering. I hope to encourage our students to reach out to special populations and enable those in need to have access to care. Life is so much more rewarding when we give.”

 

 These relationships are critical to getting the word out in the community about the college’s dental clinic and its services, in addition to helping spread the word about oral health, Rainwater says. But it’s not enough.

 

“The technology in GPC’s dental clinic is tops in Georgia—our students are well equipped to go out there and work in the public (once they graduate),” she says. But state accreditation guidelines require students to complete 12-16 hours per week of clinic experience, monitored by the dental hygiene instructors. Getting a wide cross section of the population to use the GPC clinic services benefits the clients, but also benefits the students in their oral health education, she says.

 

Educating clients about their oral health can truly make a difference—sometimes a life or death difference, says Rainwater. She learned that lesson early during her own dental hygiene education, when she began researching the causes of oral cancer in young people. The cause of many of the oral cancers was directly traced to “spit tobacco,” and it was on the rise among young people in the Southeast. The mortality rate of oral cancer hasn’t changed in 50 years,” she says. “Fifty percent live past five years—and 50 percent die.”

 

Dental hygiene students have detected everything from drug interactions that cause gum bleeding, to serious cancers, she says. “People ignore what’s going on in their mouths.”

 

Rainwater has seen the effects of oral cancer and tobacco use in her own family. Two relatives died of oral cancer, and her parents both succumbed to tobacco-related cancers.

 

She continues her crusade to educate others about tobacco use—including students, staff and faculty at the college. The GPC dental hygiene students recently hosted “Kick Butt” Day, encouraging tobacco cessation and offering free oral cancer screenings for all faculty, staff and students on the Dunwoody Campus.

 

“The biggest thing we do (here) is educate the public, especially on risk assessment. Lifestyle choices are so important. People take their life for granted when they’re young, but those lifestyle choices affect us when we’re older,” she says.