Shaenna said many of the women feel unwelcome just walking through the door of a dental practice and often felt judged.<\/p>\n
“Once they’ve been through the door once or twice with us, hopefully that will mean they’ll be able to make further appointments and have sustainable care,” she said.<\/p>\n
“We’ve had feedback from the clients and one of the questions was, ‘were you treated with dignity and respect?’ and 100% of the women said yes.”<\/p>\n
Bridge2Aid works closely with another Bristol-based charity, One25, which supports women involved in street sex work in the city.<\/p>\n
Head of services at One25, Rachel Collins-White, said several women had had treatment ranging from x-rays and fillings to tooth extractions and dentures – and she hoped more sex workers could be helped in future. <\/p>\n
“They spoke about how supportive, understanding and compassionate the students were – unfortunately women do not often receive such kind treatment. <\/p>\n
Emily – not her real name – is due to start extensive treatment at BDS.<\/p>\n
“Years ago, when I first got kicked out of my home, I was in a bed and breakfast and I didn’t have access to toothpaste and I ended up getting something called trench mouth [a severe gum infection].”<\/p>\n
Now a member of One25’s lived experience group, Emily said it was reassuring that she would be seeing the same dental student throughout her treatment and that it was “an amazing thing to get your quality of life back”.<\/p>\n
“To find out that you can get quite severe illnesses from not having proper oral hygiene, and to try and nip that in the bud as early as possible for these women who may not even be able to access clean water, is amazing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shaenna said many of the women feel unwelcome just walking through the door of a dental practice and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1164407,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[8818],"tags":[381,748,393,4884,16,15],"class_list":["post-1164406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bristol","tag-bristol","tag-britain","tag-england","tag-great-britain","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117143529257188841","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1164406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1164406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1164406\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1164407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1164406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1164406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1164406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}