Mobile Clinic Tours the Neighborhood
2/8/2007

The USC Mobile Clinic stops in USC's own backyard.
By Veronica Jauriqui

February is Children’s Dental Health Month. And what better way to celebrate the occasion than by giving the gift of a perfect smile, courtesy of the USC Mobile Clinic.

Continuing its efforts to provide free oral health care to underserved communities throughout Southern California, the Mobile Clinic spent a week at nearby Ninth Street Elementary School in early February. There, the Mobile Clinic volunteers treated more than 60 children from kindergarten through the sixth grade. One four-year-old child—the sibling of a student—also received his first oral examination.

Ninth Street Elementary serves children who live in and around the Skid Row area of Downtown Los Angeles, and is located in one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in the city. According to numbers from California’s Department of Education, 100 percent of children who attend Ninth Street Elementary School come from families whose incomes are between 130 and 185 percent below federal poverty levels.

“Many of these children come from families who don’t have health insurance let alone have ever seen a dentist,” says Uyen Nguyen, a third-year doctoral dental student at USC. “If the Mobile Clinic wasn’t here, there would be no way that many of these families could even afford these services.”