Sarah Redwood Uganda

Tell me about your fundraising – what worked well and how did people respond?

I funded the first trip myself and for this year I just had a Just Giving page and put it out to friends, family, my church and colleagues. I was incredibly blessed to raise the full amount Dentaid required in time for the final deadline. (My sons made up the shortfall at the very end!) Peoples’ generosity blew me away!

What were your first impressions of the country and the communities you visited?

I had visited other parts of Africa previously so it wasn’t too much of a culture shock in some respects. However, I found the Ugandan people to be so friendly, warm, happy and welcoming. Many of the communities we visited were remote where people have so little – yet they get on with life very cheerfully. It was truly humbling!

Could you walk us through how you set up and ran a typical clinic day?

A typical clinic day involved breakfast with the team and then bus travel to our venue for the day. On arrival there were sometimes already people waiting in the queue for treatment – many of our patients had been in pain for a very long time. We usually had to clear the space in which to work e.g. move church pews outside or to the edges of the space. We then unloaded all the equipment from the van. This included the chairs, decon equipment, buckets (bins) and jerry cans (for sharps) and then all our instruments, and consumables such as materials, PPE, toothbrushes and toothpaste etc. This amounted to a fair amount of kit but with everyone working together it was done swiftly.

At our pre-clinic huddle, our team leader (the wonderful Gail Taylor) then assigned roles for the day. The queue formed outside and waited very patiently to be triaged by a Ugandan Dental Public Health Officer (a number of these great clinicians joined us each day), and we set to work in clinician and “nurse” (sometimes a clinician) pairs. 2 of the team ran the “clean table” passing instruments to our trays as required, to avoid contamination, and mixing materials. Richard (a Ugandan non-dental man) took care of all the decontamination of instruments by scrubbing and processing with a gas burner and pressure cooker and the post-operative table was run by our Team Leader.

We stopped for a lunch break but nobody wanted to stop for long as the aim each day was to treat everyone that joined the queue and not have to turn anyone away. We had to have a cut-off point according to how far we had to travel after the clinic.

I found the system very efficient; when working as a clinician (Dental Therapist) on arrival at my chair an already triaged patient came with a treatment plan, after checking consent (with a local interpreter where needed) treatment was done quickly and the patient then went immediately to the post-op area. This meant clinicians did not have to wait for haemostasis after extractions or to give post-op advice therefore maximising the chair time. With no record keeping to do (very refreshing I must say!), after a wipe down and change of PPE the next patient was very quickly on the chair and the cycle began again.

All patients received the post-op advice they needed and pain relief / antibiotics as required as well as toothbrushing instruction with the gift of a toothbrush and tube of toothpaste from the post-op area. Treatments done ranged from extractions, simple fillings (using portable, rechargeable slow handpieces and glass ionomer cement), fluoride application and simple scaling.