The Wake Smiles dental clinic aims to serve thousands of uninsured adults in Wake County who have little or no access to dental care by providing them with access to complementary care to bridge the divide between those with and without access to quality health care. The organization is the only clinic in Wake County that specifically targets this vulnerable population, and aims to accomplish this goal by utilizing a wide network of local volunteers.
In order to utilize this resource, there is a need for a robust application that must be able to keep track of hundreds of volunteers while being easy for the volunteers to use and easy for the volunteers to use and reliable to ensure the organization provides crucial dental care to a vulnerable population. Our app enables Wake Smiles to effectively manage hundreds of volunteers by allowing anyone to easily register themselves as volunteers, submit paperwork and other files, sign up for shifts, and view upcoming shifts, as well as cancel and reschedule their own shifts. The dental clinic will be able to view all scheduled volunteers who are scheduled for a certain shift more easily and modify schedules all in one place. These features aim to make the management of volunteers more efficient, which will save time spent handling logistics and enable Wake Smiles to put more resources into providing quality dental care to those well below the federal poverty guideline.
In the previous semester, another group worked to implement an app where volunteers could register themselves, upload paperwork, and sign up for shifts. For this semester, our team will improve the existing volunteer signup app in areas such as UI and performance. In addition, we will create another app specifically designed for the Wake Smiles administrators to more easily view all data, sort through data, and update data, as well as provide other tools such as mass email communication and more customized search options that are not provided directly by the Supabase console. As the Wake Smiles volunteering program grows in number of registrations and shifts, the new administrative app will enable the admin to better manage their extensive network of volunteers to provide better care for those with lower income.
Providing dental care to all kinds of people, regardless of income has more to do than just strengthening teeth. A high risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, and many other prevalent diseases is frequently associated with poor dental health, which is expensive for the healthcare system as a whole. Most low-income adults rarely, if ever, visit the dentist; therefore, by making it possible for this population to receive dental examinations in an affordable and caring manner, we will be able to tap into the underutilized dental care system and lessen the burden on the overall healthcare system.