One thing that's great about the patients that we see here at ULSD, it is a cultural melting pot. You see every different ethnicity, background, religion, all that.
You see different kinds of people, different backgrounds, different financial situations. So it gives you the opportunity to see how you're able to work with those patients.
It's really important to establish a relationship with your patient, figure out what their background is before assuming anything. So it's been really vital to my future as a dentist to learn about the different patients, to learn about their different experiences.
Being in a medical campus is a blessing and a plus because most of patients not only have a dental problem, they might have additional medical problems. Sometimes you need to refer the patient to a medical consult or for adding more information before providing the dental treatment.
We get to see a lot of patients that have a lot of variety of needs. So whether it be dentures, needing extractions, root canals, a lot of patients have various things that we can work on treatment planning and get experience with doing their care.
All of that experience that we get here in the clinic at school is then augmented when we go on these external rotations. We go up into the Appalachians to Redbird Christian mission. We go to Shawnee here in Louisville. We go to the Family Health Centers here in Louisville. We go on our AHEC, that's an externship in the summer. You're going to see all parts of humanity coming into those places.
One of the best parts of that has been working with the different covering faculty that are at those outside clinics. You see how they interact with patients and their different tips and tricks as far as clinical skills and patient management help complete our clinical experience, per se. It's also been fun to see what life would be like in a public health dentistry setting.
We have a clinic in Paducah, and I'm from Murray, Kentucky, so I was very familiar with the area. That clinic is one of the few clinics that accepts Medicaid in that area. The clinic is booked out, and that's where I was able to do all of my extractions and do all of my fillings and become a very confident practitioner. I ended up doing 40 fillings and 40 extractions in a span of two weeks.
You get like a more private setting feeling like it's very fast paced. So you get to learn how to deal with multiple patients at the same time. And you just develop that confidence and clinical skills. And it's also a great opportunity to serve the underserved community in our area.
I love the mission based, the mission-minded philosophy of the School of Dentistry here. We get to reach different people and see a different subset of population that we might not see here in the big city of Louisville. We get to hone down and see some of these rural areas and really get to engage in different types of people.
It all comes down to our patients and the communities we serve. When we just have more exposure to different experiences other than our own, it really does provide a sense of compassion within ourselves and in our school to provide the best experience for our students and patients.
