Dental service is now available in your Shanghai neighborhood

Now you can receive basic and convenient dental services in your neighborhood, thanks to a project to set up such services in community health centers. Now, 83 of the 248 community health centers in Shanghai are offering the service, with more to join up soon.

To ensure the quality of the grassroots dental service, Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital, the leading public hospital with the best dental capability in the city, has teamed up with health authorities in the districts of Huangpu, Yangpu, Baoshan and Songjiang to forge an alliance by providing training and technology support to neighborhood medical staff.

A total of 16 community health centers are included in the alliance, whose quality control is handled by Shanghai Ninth.

Through the alliance, patients in local communities in the four districts can also enjoy better access to senior experts at the hospital through a patient transfer network.

The alliance can help improve the medical capability of dental service in the neighborhood while allowing patients to receive basic and high-quality dental service near their home instead of going all the way to a crowded leading hospital, officials of the Shanghai Health Commission said.

The commission is pushing to improve and perfect service items and quality at grassroots facilities to build a categorized healthcare system, through which community-based facilities serve patients with common and basic diseases while leading hospitals take on complicated cases.

"Expatriates also can benefit from the project as many of them have regular need for dental check-ups and cleansing. They can visit nearby community health centers for convenient service," said Dr Wang Xudong, vice president of Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital.

"For emergency or higher demand, they can visit our hospital, whose international department has experienced medical staff from home and abroad."

Basic dental services available in the community health centers are:

Routine dental checkups, decayed tooth treatment, fluoridization for children, pit and fissure sealant, dental cleaning, tooth extraction, small dental surgery, false tooth repairing, root canal therapy, warm gutta-percha obturation, early orthodontics for children.