Haiti is a vulnerable country for economic reasons and also due to its climate and geographical location. In 2010, the small country was struck by a severe earthquake. At present, dental care for the 11 million inhabitants of the French-speaking Caribbean state is provided by just 500 dentists. Haiti’s dental faculty, the Faculté d'Odontologie – Université d'Etat d'Haïti, is currently the only training centre for the country’s dentists. The few dental surgeries that exist are difficult or even impossible to reach for people from rural areas.
The hospital partnership between the Dental International Aid Networking Organisation (DIANO) and the Faculté d'Odontologie - Université d'Etat d'Haïti aims to restore basic dental care throughout the country. One approach is through mobile clinics that are designed to reach sections of the Haitian population that have previously had no dental care. One mobile clinic with eight to twelve employees can treat up to 1,000 patients per week. Education and further training for local employees is also a top priority for the partnership. The Haitian-German hospital partners currently work primarily in the rural areas in the north of the country, as very few people there have access to dental health and dental care services. Focusing on education and further training locally helps to boost expertise and gets trainee dental technicians involved in hands-on work through on-the-job training. In addition, the hospital partners develop the curriculum for dental assistant professions, which are then used as the basis for setting up new training courses that were previously unavailable in this form.
The zm Zahnärztliche Mitteilungen magazine featured an article on the hospital partnership.