Student Profile Olayinka Adekugbe DMD 22

Student Profile: Yinka

GSDM student receives grant for oral health promotion work

By Shannon C. Broderick

Before moving to Boston to start the Doctor of Dental Medicine Advanced Standing program at GSDM, Olayinka Adekugbe DMD 22 completed a dental public health residency at the University of Iowa in Iowa City—where she found that many African immigrants and refugees enrolled in Medicaid and living in Iowa were unaware that there was a dental wellness plan included in their health insurance.

“Quite a number of them didn’t even know that they were entitled to get the [dental] wellness plan,” Adekugbe said. “Maybe they were not aware, or they just weren’t sure how to access healthcare in general.”

So Adekugbe created the Oral Health Program Project, which aims to make oral health care accessible to immigrants. She recently received a $25,000 grant from Delta Dental of Iowa to continue growing her organization, which works to raise awareness and to connect the African population in Iowa to oral healthcare services available to them.

“The healthcare system in America can be quite complex,” Adekugbe said. “Having to navigate this, to get into the health system, sometimes you get tired.”

The organization has also worked to provide materials in different languages, including French and Swahili, with Arabic materials in the works.

“The African immigrant population is quite diverse,” Adekugbe said. “They speak French, they speak Swahili, they speak Arabic. I felt language was a barrier, so it was also creating languageappropriate oral health education that we could use with the different language groups.”

Adekugbe said that the next step for the organization is oral health screenings—and she hopes that someday the organization will grow into a community dental health center.

“People want services,” Adekugbe said. “Maybe in the future, we will need to have a community dental center, where we can provide those services.”

Adekugbe, who also has master’s degrees in public health and dental public health from New York University and the University of Iowa respectively and has worked with Save the Children and USAID, said that her time at GSDM strengthened her clinical dentistry skills while transforming the way that she thinks about this project.

“I think wearing the clinical hat with the public health hat makes a better blend than when I was just a public health practitioner,” Adekugbe said. “Having that blend—everything coming together into one single piece—is really very nice.”