Ten-year-old Thea has been waiting nearly two years to show off her big smile.
In addition to dental fillings and extractions, the Moncton girl needs surgery to fix a chipped front tooth — a surgery she’s been waiting for since January 2024.
“We’ve basically missed two years of pictures with her where she doesn’t want to have a smile, so we’re looking to get this taken care of,” said her father, Dan Richard.
He says at this point, he’s considering paying roughly $5,000 out of pocket to have the surgery done in another province.
“It’s unfortunate. We understand the health-care system is overwhelmed, and we want to be understanding of that, but (…) we want to make sure that our children are taken care of, and that’s why I’m here today, to be an advocate for my daughter and for other children.”
The family has been referred to Dr. Tom Raddall, New Brunswick’s only board-certified pediatric dental specialist, who says he’s struggling to get enough operating room time to keep up with demand.
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“I think the fundamental thing is that my specialty of pediatric dentistry is not recognized within the province like it is in other provinces in Canada,” Raddall said.
“And therefore, the appropriate resources haven’t been allocated to us.”
Pediatric dentists receive two to three extra years of education after an undergraduate degree at a dental school. Raddall says he is often referred medically-complex cases or patients who require special care.
“The cases I get referred the most are kids that are very young, that have a lot of dental treatment to do,” he said.
“I get referred to patients who are maybe a little bit older, have a lot of work to do, but have already failed in (a general dentist office setting).”
He says he often has to travel across the province — many times to less-populated northern parts of New Brunswick — to get the operating room time his patients need.
“I do get referrals from all over the province, but I just haven’t really gotten those resources close to home. So, some months, personally, I’ve driven over 5,000 kilometres to different hospitals,” he said.
“The bigger (issue) is not so much me, it’s that the patient families can’t can’t get there.”
The result, he says, is that his waitlist includes some 300 children who have to wait up to two years for hospital-based dental surgery.
The province’s health minister, John Dornan, says operating room access is a problem across the board. He says the government is trying to improve surgery access in general.
“Nothing to say we are prioritizing dental surgeries but we continue to recognize it’s a problem,” Dornan said.
“We’ve challenged our CEOs and (regional health authorities) to maybe open up our (operating room) times available. There’s a cost to that, a manpower cost to that, so we are working on all surgical access.”
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