A dental clinic with a view

Starting a new job while in lockdown isn’t easy in any industry, but when your new role requires you to travel around the state, it can be particularly daunting.

Flying Doctor dentist Niamh Grant moved from the UK to Australia in January 2020 – “that was a bit of a weird time to move to a different country,” she admits on reflection – and after working in private practice for a time, she accepted a job with RFDS Victoria in April of 2021.

“There have been a few hiccups on the way because of COVID-19 and lockdowns and everything else, so I've only been on the road a few times,” says Niamh. “But I have really enjoyed [working with the Flying Doctor Dental Clinic]. It's been really, really great.”

To some, it may seem an odd choice to leave a secure job in a private dental clinic to one in the public sector during a pandemic, but for Niamh, it was an easy decision to make.

“Before I came to Australia, my roles were only in public health care,” says Niamh. “And so when I came here and started working in private practice, I found I really missed that public health care aspect.

“I just really wanted to do something that was exciting and a different experience,” Niamh adds. “I wanted to explore some of Australia, work with different people and meet people from different places, backgrounds and cultures. Plus, I wanted to be able to help people who don't ordinarily have access to health care or who can't afford to access dental care – which gives me higher job satisfaction as well.”

And experiences for a dentist from the UK don’t get much more different than working with the Flying Doctor.

“The RFDS is so unique. In the UK, you can pretty much get anywhere by car, and it doesn't take you too long. Whereas Australia is so vast, and these communities are so isolated that you do have to think, how do they access health care and dental care?”

Flying Doctor Dental was launched back in 2012 because of this very question. Since people in many of Victoria’s rural and remote communities do not have a local dentist, or even a public dentist clinic within a few hours’ drive, RFDS Victoria partnered with Dental Health Services Victoria (DHSV) and Australian Dental Association Victorian Branch (ADAVB) to send dentists into these communities in custom-designed dental vans – creating some very unique workplaces for our health professionals.

“It's quite cool!” says Niamh. “When I first saw the van, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is amazing, there’s so much stuff in there!’ You can actually fit a lot inside a van.”

While Niamh hasn’t been able to hit the road with the clinic as much as she would have liked these past few months due to Victoria’s rolling lockdowns, she notes that in her few trips through the state, she has met some wonderful patients who have made her all the more appreciative of the service she and the Flying Doctor offers.

“I remember one patient from the last time I was on the road, who suffered from autism and was deaf,” says Niamh. “He presented to our truck very late at night on our first day in town, just as we were packing up, and he had obviously suffered some dental trauma and some trauma to his lip as well. He'd unfortunately been assaulted for no reason, and had some loose teeth and a big laceration to his lip. It was awful.”

However, Niamh was able to treat the man’s trauma and suture his lip. “Things like that, when someone just comes to the van last minute, means you have to change your plans, and push back your pack up time, and you get back home a little bit later. But it doesn't matter, as we were able to help someone.

“I don't know where he would have gone [if the dental van wasn’t there]. He could have gone to the local hospital, but he wouldn't have been seen by a dentist.”

While last minute emergencies like this are not all too common for the clinic, the Flying Doctor Dental team are privy to a number of other barriers some communities face in terms of accessing health care, highlighting just how important mobile services like the dental clinic truly are.

“It surprises me actually how many patients we've treated so far who don't have a car,” says Niamh. “Whether that's for financial reasons, or other reasons, I'm not sure – we spoke to one patient in Alexandra and he told us, ‘I sold my car when I left Melbourne in 1982 and I have not left Alexandra since!’.

“But most of the patients really rely on the service being in the town and being able to walk or cycle there. A lot of patients just wait until we come back to the towns every two years. And before we existed, some of them hadn't seen a dentist for 10, 20, 30 years, or however long.

“And it's not just the isolation that makes accessing health care difficult; there are also financial reasons as well. And dentists, unfortunately, aren't the cheapest to go to, so it just makes you think, the Flying Doctor Dental Clinic, which is a free service, is really quite important.”

Despite the hurdles the pandemic and its lockdowns have presented, Niamh is grateful for the new and thoroughly unique experiences she has been afforded by working with the Flying Doctor Dental Clinic.

“It's not like a normal dentist job, where you're just coming in and doing the same thing every day in the same place, from nine to five,” says Niamh. “With the Flying Doctor, you can actually go out and explore and see things as well. I was on the Great Ocean Road a couple of months ago – it’s like being on holiday, it was beautiful!”