Cody, 8, a patient at the dental clinic, picks up a wooden car out of a bucket shaped like a tooth following his appointment Monday afternoon at the Valleyview Health Center in Centralia.
Pope’s Kids Place Dental Clinic became Valley View Health Center Children’s Dental Clinic on Sept. 17.
Valley View Health Center Marketing Director Linda Tomasheck said the dental clinic has the same staff and will continue offering the same services.
However, Valley View recently hired a bilingual receptionist and a bilingual dental assistant. She said the clinic is currently recruiting a full-time pediatric dentist.
Clinic Manager Melissa Bouley said day-to-day operations should look the same to patients. She said the main change patients may notice is that not all children will be allowed to bring their parents to the dentist chair.
“There are a few changes,” Bouley said. “Before we were able to allow parents to come back with their child and that has changed a bit. We still allow it with certain circumstance and ages, though.”
Bouley said that children under 6 years old are still allowed to bring their parents back with them, but older children are supposed to go by themselves.
“For the most part we are trying to encourage the children to be able to learn how to be away from mom and dad and go to the back,” Bouley said. “It makes a big difference as the children get older. … That’s kind of new for our kids, but otherwise day-to-day operations haven’t changed too much.”
Michael LeClair, Valley View Health Center board member and also a retired dentist, helped the clinic transition from Pope’s Kids Place to Valley View. He was a dentist at Pope’s Kids Place for about a year and a half when the clinic needed help.
“One of the reasons Pope’s Kids Place transferred the clinic to Valley View was because there were some things that most likely needed updating and they were fairly expensive to do,” LeClair said.
LeClair noted that Pope’s Kids Place used all paper records until Valley View took over.
“To be a modern clinic, electronic health records is the way to go,” LeClair said. “That is the biggest change Valley View has made so far. They have transferred to all electronic records. Overall, it’s a step into the modern world.”
LeClair noted that he believes Valley View will maintain the mission of Pope’s Kids Place.
“The majority of our patients by far were low-income children on Medicaid, Medicare,” LeClair said. “There aren’t a lot of clinics in the area that take that group of people as patients, so it was providing a great service to the community.”
This is Valley View’s 13th clinic. In 2015, Valley View also took over the pediatric center on Washington Way from Pope’s Kids Place. Tomasheck said Pope’s Kids Place approached Valley View again to take over the dental clinic at the end of this summer.
Tomasheck said that Valley View Health Center doesn’t currently have plans to acquire more clinics, but that it potentially will if it comes across a promising opportunity.
“We didn’t have plans to acquire this one and it happened in a very short turn around period,” Tomasheck said. “I think it was about two months in the acquisition of this. You never know where an opportunity comes from.”
