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During the month of November, 1,971 dental appointments were made. One hundred Marines and Sailors failed to show up for their dental appointments.
It is important to keep appointments so service members are mission ready when deployed.
“Because when they deploy, if they haven’t received the care they need beforehand, they could have a medical emergency happen in the field or overseas,” said Lt. Cmdr. Angela Sessa, the director of Marine Corps Air Station New River, Camp Geiger and Camp Johnson dental. “And then they do not have access to medical or dental benefits and we have to medevac them out which costs a lot of money to the military, and it would send them to a potentially third world country hospital, so they don’t get the same care as they would in garrison.”
Most Marines and Sailors miss their appointments because of work, permanently changing stations, holidays and deployment.
“We’ve had a lot of failures because of the holidays,” said Sessa. “We have a lot of people deployed. We have a lot of people coming back from deployment so that’s definitely affecting our readiness and appointment basis. With the PCS season in the summer we have the same thing happen, that people are getting ready to PCS. They have other things they have to do before they PCS so sometimes we become lower priority.”
The clinics do what they can to keep patients aware of their appointments. They give appointment slips the day when scheduled in person, and they call the day before to remind you of the appointment again. They also send emails.
“We have emails that go out to them,” said Sessa. “So when we make the appointment there’s an email sent out, and 24 hours prior there is an email sent out. We all call the patient on their cell phone and confirm their appointment.”
The clinic also notifies the chain of commands of failed appointments and who has future ones.
“The commands are notified every Wednesday-Thursday, we send out the list to the commands of who failed the week prior,” said Sessa. “We also send a list of who has an appointment coming up the following week.”
Even with the helpful staff at medical and dental, Marines and Sailors still miss their appointments.
“We have 12 providers and most of them see eight patients a day,” said Jacqueline James, the medical support clerk at MCAS New River dental. “Usually out of that amount of patients, we usually have at least eight to ten failures a day.
Instead of failing to show up, other Marines and Sailors call to cancel the appointments.
“We have a lot of people that do call ahead, sometimes an hour ahead, sometimes 12 hours ahead, a full 24 (hours) or a week ahead,” said Sessa.
Calling ahead to cancel the appointment helps the clinic get other service members to fill the now empty appointment.
“If we can’t get anyone to fill in that spot, it means the doctor and technician sit around for an hour basically doing nothing,” said James. “So it would be beneficial if they would call ahead of time because we can get another service person in and that way the clinic is not wasting time and losing dollars.”
| Date Taken: | 12.08.2017 |
| Date Posted: | 12.14.2017 10:42 |
| Story ID: | 258623 |
| Location: | NV, US |
| Web Views: | 7 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Keeping appointments adds to mission readiness, by Cpl Dominique Osthoff, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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