Free Dentistry Day

When we think of helping others in need of dental care, our thoughts almost always drift to some remote part of the world where people have low dental IQ and minimal access to anything, let alone dental care.

While many dentists go on international dental missions to provide free dental care for needy people, there is a need in Canada to provide such services. And it is not just in some small towns in the far corners of a province or territory, but also in many big Canadian cities. To this end, we launched a Canadian initiative to implore dental clinics nationwide extend an Annual Free Dentistry Day (FDD) in their offices to serve their local communities.

In the Annual Free Dentistry Day, the dental office designates a day in each year to provide free dental care for those who cannot access dental care. The dentist and his/her team will pick a day, typically a Saturday, when the whole team will volunteer their time to provide those in need with basic dental care- an extraction, a filling or a cleaning. The patient gets to choose one free service.

We started this initiative in 2015 and on Saturday September 28th, 2019 we held our 5th Annual Free Dentistry Day at Centrum Dental. Although our day started just before 8am, the lineup outside our office started at 2am! We were privileged to treat kids as young as 5 to adults in their 80’s during this event. We had people travel from as far as two hours away to visit us.

We had many returning volunteers as well as some new volunteers who all worked tirelessly to keep this very busy day on track. A huge thank you goes out to our team and all our volunteers who helped make this day such an amazing success!

This initiative has started to spread to other clinics in Ottawa and elsewhere in Ontario. To date over 500 patients have received about $200,000 worth of free dental care. Our hope is that in the next 3 years, this initiative reaches a total of over 1,000 patients in the process providing over $500,000 worth of free dental care.

None of this would have been possible with you the support and loyalty, of you, our dear patients. You have allowed us to give back to our community and we hope to continue to do so for many years to come.

We thank you from the bottom of our hearts

Dr Yamen Ghamian and Dr Habib Khoury