Vermont

Vermont scrambles to address dental hygienist shortage

Published

2 years ago

on

May 2, 2024

By

Press Room

Vermont scrambles to address dental hygienist shortage

BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – Do you need your teeth cleaned? Good luck getting an appointment any time soon. A lack of dental hygienists means some practices are not taking new patients and some say the shortage is the worst they’ve ever seen.

Chelsea Wells loves making people smile, but finding help to do so is like pulling teeth. “It’s a stress that you don’t realize, it’s just kind of always there,” Wells said. “That’s not good continuity of care.”

Wells is the only full-time hygienist at the UVM Medical Center’s oral and dental health facility. She says a second full-time position has been open for two years. “Right now, it’s just about patient care. Right now, people aren’t getting… I think we’re here looking out nine or 10 months,” Wells said.

The UVMMC dental office is currently not taking any new patients because of the hygienist shortage. Oftentimes, the dentists themselves need to do cleanings. “We believe that we’re really at a crisis level at this point in delivering and delivering oral health care,” said Dr. Justin Hurlburt, a UVMMC dentist president of the Vermont Dental Society.

UVMMC’s office is known as a safety net facility for patients who have the highest need and often do not have private insurance or are on Medicaid. “We stopped taking new patients, which is which is scary for a safety net facility,” Hurlburt said. “A lot of dentists around town are doing hygiene now to try to keep up, to try to keep their practices going, and that takes away time from them being able to to do dentistry on their patients.”

The problem started during the pandemic. Hygienists either retired or left the profession and there were too few to fill the jobs. Wells says that’s because an oversaturation of hygienists a decade ago caused many new hygienists to leave the state. “There were a lot of people that in recent graduating classes, they didn’t stay here, they went elsewhere. So then, when all the people either retired or left the workforce, we didn’t have a lot of those new hygenists that we could pull from because they had moved elsewhere,” Wells said.

So how does the state bridge the gap? Vermont State University has the only dental hygiene school in the state. Usually, around 15 to 18 students graduate the program each year. Recently the program switched from two years to three years so they are graduating two classes of students. That means 34 students recently passed their clinical boards and are on their way to graduation, but that no students will graduate in the spring of 2025.

“We see these swings in the market every so often,” said VSU’s Heather Blair. “We were graduating hygienists that couldn’t find full time employment. They’d have to do two days in one practice, two days in another practice. And that was like that for a number of years. And now it’s shifted. It will shift again as we catch up.”

School officials say they don’t want to flood the market with hygienists again as it was pre-pandemic. However, dentists and hygienists we spoke to say they need help — stat. “We need to go to the grassroots and develop our own students here. And I don’t think we’re being successful at that right now,” Hurlburt said.

The VSU program is also demanding. Many hygienists say it’s extremely difficult, which is why some students drop out. And when a student quits — even early into the education — the school cannot fill that spot because a new student would be too far behind.

“It takes a lot of study hours, a lot of reinforcement. You do have the support from the faculty as well. They’re not lying when they say it’s difficult, but I mean, I’m not a Mensa genius. I’m still in the program and I’m slated to graduate in May,” said Rita Veve, a graduating student.

Students are ready to go straight into a job after the program. Most students have jobs before even graduating. Many dental offices are also offering generous hiring bonuses on top of wages that can be upwards of $55 per hour or around $115,000 a year. “Right now, it’s a great time to be a hygienist because you can find employment in almost whatever setting you’re looking for,” Blair said.

In the meantime, dentists and existing hygienists will try to fill the gap in oral care. “We want to help everybody. we would help everybody if we could, but we just can’t.,” Hurlburt said.

Senator Peter Welch secured $5.9 million for the dental hygiene school, which will increase the number of students in the program, but that’s still several years down the line.

Source link

Related Topics:dental Featured hygienists vermont WCAX

Click to comment

Vermont

Hundreds of housing units in the works at closely-watched project in Burlington’s South End – VTDigger

Published

2 hours ago

on

June 3, 2026

By

Press Room

Hundreds of housing units in the works at closely-watched project in Burlington’s South End – VTDigger

A rendering of the South End Coordinated Redevelopment Project, courtesy of Andrew Foley, development director at Jonathan Rose Companies. Credit: GOA Architecture.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

A long-awaited housing development that could bring hundreds of new apartments to a series of empty lots in Burlington’s South End neighborhood is beginning to come together.

The first phase of the major public-private deal, called the South End Coordinated Redevelopment Project, got official sign-off from the Burlington City Council last month. The project’s backers have also scored key funding commitments from Treasurer Mike Pieciak’s office and state housing funding agencies.

The project on Lakeside Avenue is the beginning of “a neighborhood being born out of a big parking lot,” Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak told city councilors in May.

City officials and developers hope the project could eventually include over a thousand homes, making it one of the largest developments in Vermont – and putting a considerable dent in the Queen City’s housing shortage. Regional planners estimate that Burlington needs to add between 3,500 and 10,500 homes by 2050 to get the housing market to a healthy state.

The development is possible, in part, because of a 2023 zoning change in the formerly industrial area that allows for some of the densest housing development in the state, according to local planners.

The South End project’s backers include Champlain College, Champlain Housing Trust and Ride Your Bike LLC, the investors behind the nearby Hula coworking campus. They have brought on Jonathan Rose Companies, an affordable housing developer with projects from New York to California, as the lead developer. The South End project is the company’s first in Vermont.

The development agreement signed by city councilors in May greenlights the South End project’s first 204 units, estimated to cost roughly $100 million.

Per Burlington’s inclusionary zoning policy and state rules, at least 20% of the first round of apartments will be set aside as affordable. But the developers hope to secure enough funding to allow them to earmark a third of the 204 apartments with income restrictions, said Andrew Foley, director of development at Jonathan Rose Companies, in an interview. The development agreement offers the developers reduced city fees if the affordable units are priced even more modestly than required.

The lion’s share of the new apartments will be studios and one-bedrooms, Foley said. The building would include common social spaces for neighbors to gather, he added.

Like any large-scale housing project, the developers of the South End apartments are piecing together financing from a wide array of sources. They recently scored an $8 million low-interest loan from Pieciak’s 10% for Vermont program, along with a $6.7 million award from the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board to support 67 affordable apartments – including 10 reserved for people experiencing homelessness.

To build out new roads – along with wastewater connections and stormwater infrastructure meant to cut down on sewer overflows into nearby Lake Champlain – city officials are going after funding from a new state program. The Community and Housing Infrastructure Program, a tax-increment financing tool created by the Legislature last year, would allow the city and the developers to borrow the funds needed to build out the infrastructure against the development’s future property tax revenue.