Since 1975, the Mount Sinai Hospital Dental Department in conjunction with the Discipline of Pediatric Dentistry at the Faculty of Dentistry, University of Toronto has offered a unique dental program for persons with special needs.

The program is designed to address oral health issues specific to this population and provide an access point for oral care for persons with special needs in an educational environment. The dental care is provided by a team that includes undergraduate and graduate dental students and staff. The original objectives of this program were twofold: first, offer necessary dental care to individuals with special needs; and second, provide an educational experience to dental students so that they would then welcome and treat this patient group in their dental practices after graduation.

Mount Sinai Hospital’s Dentistry program for Persons with Disabilities is the largest clinic of its kind in Canada and one of the best programs for persons with special needs in the world.

To date, the program has been extremely successful and boasts the largest patient base of any such program for persons with special needs in Canada. In fact, recent research has demonstrated that our graduates are seeing patients with special needs in their own private practices already.

Despite the fact that both of the above noted goals have been achieved, in particular the fact that graduates who have trained in this program are treating special needs patients in their practices, the waiting lists and demand for care from the community continue to grow. Indeed, the current wait for initial consultation is 6 months and a further 12 months for dental care under general anesthesia. This has created a substantial burden and unfortunately, this hospital-based clinical program only has a finite budget, staff, and spacing resources and simply cannot expand to meet this increasing demand.

The Mount Sinai Hospital program cannot refer these individuals to other programs or community practitioners because these resources simply do not currently exist. Unless there is an immediate infusion of resources, the access-to-care issues will worsen before they improve for these individuals with special needs, placing them at increased risk for pain and dysfunction caused by untreated oral disease which may also shorten their lifespan.

Mount Sinai Hospital Dental Residency Orientation Overview

View an informative overview and introduction of the Hospital Dental Residency Program (HDR) offered at Mount Sinai Hospital.