(AFP) – Under the plane trees, the residents of the retirement home wait to board the bus: in Simorre, a Gers village in the heart of a dental desert, it is in this vehicle imagined by the local Red Cross that you have to take a seat to take care of your teeth.
The passenger compartment measures just over 9 m2. But “there is all the equipment that one finds in a dental practice”, welcomes Sébastien Delmotte, 44, a volunteer from the Red Cross in charge of fitting out the mini-bus which for a month has been crisscrossing the ” white zones” of this end of Gascony, just over an hour from Toulouse.
“Here you shouldn’t get sick: there are no more doctors, the pharmacy has closed and for the dentist, there is only one practice 25 minutes away, and you really have to spit blood for them to take you”, laughs Jean-Luc Laval, a resident of Simorre who, seeing the bus, parked his bike to have a crown checked.
The vehicle, where care is free, serves eight villages having “the common point of being far from everything”, underlines Marie-José Zago, 68, vice-president of the Gers Red Cross and linchpin of the project.
In Simorre, the converted Peugeot Boxer mini-bus is installed at the edge of a crossroads, under the gaze of a statue of the Virgin, with opposite an old adobe building, on which the inscription “blacksmith” and the silhouette of a drawn horse are still visible.
– “Rinse-quenottes” –
It was thanks to another Red Cross vehicle, dedicated to food aid, that the idea of the dental bus took off. “The truck manager told us + there are lots of problems with people who don’t have a dentist and who suffer a lot from their teeth +”, explains Ms. Zago.
With her team, she then contacted the faculty of dental surgery in Toulouse, with the idea of soliciting students to operate the bus. The university authorities give their agreement, provided that these future dentists are accompanied by a referring professional.
“I have a retired dentist friend who is also a winegrower. The guy, he makes wine called Rince-quenottes, and when we needed to find dentists, he was the one who s ‘is in charge of it,’ says the earthy Ms. Zago, whom everyone on the team calls Marie-Jo.
It was also necessary to find funding, meet the technical challenge of limiting the weight of the bus as much as possible so that it could be driven without a heavy goods vehicle license on the small roads of the Gers, then discuss with various partners: Regional Health Agency (ARS ), Primary health insurance fund (CPAM) or the order of dentists.
Since the launch of the project at the beginning of May, seven dentists (four retired, two part-time and one active participant on her holidays) take turns on the bus at the start of each week alongside two sixth and final year dental faculty students.
– “See the field” –
“I’m just looking at the mouth to see if everything is fine”: Luna Desnot, 25 and soon to have her dental degree in her pocket, tries to reassure a worried elderly lady who has taken her place in the chair of the dental bus.
“As students, we are happy to be able to have this experience, to see the field, to work a little bit everywhere to have a point of view on the surroundings of Toulouse and to see how to help the patients”, explains- her to AFP.
On the patient side, a smile – after the visit – is also required. “I think it’s great. A very nice initiative!”, Says Jacques Retrus, 82, relieved when “a badly damaged tooth (him) hurt”.
However, he considers it “a bit unfortunate” that the Red Cross has to make up for the lack of practitioners in the field.
A situation that “Marie-Jo” also deplores: “We are reducing the numerus clausus (…) but we are not thinking that in the countryside, and perhaps moreover in the cities, there are no more dentist and people are left with their pain and no one to treat them”.