Expansion of community dental clinic to adults and children from immigrant, refugee, and asylee backgrounds
Sheela Lewis and Deepika Ramachandran

Dental caries is the most common condition present among recently arriving refugees, yet there remains a decline in their utilization of dental insurance. In 2014, Pew Research reported 240, 000 undocumented immigrants, of which 5.3% live in San Francisco, Oakland and Hayward areas.1 Resettling in a new country is an arduous task, and our project aims to alleviate this oral health disparity by working with the Bay Area Refugee Transitions to provide oral health education and referrals to the UCSF Free Community Dental Clinics (UCSF CDC) for comprehensive care. Our Community Partners: Refugee Transitions is a community-based nonprofit agency serving high-need, low-income refugee, asylee, and immigrant newcomers who have experienced forced migration due to war, violence, or economic duress. It supports this population in becoming self-sufficient and successful in their new communities. UCSF CDC is a free evening clinic that has been working to improve the health of San Francisco’s homeless population for the past decade. The philosophy of the CDC is to motivate patients to seek healthcare and to prevent dental disease through education and preventive dentistry.