Tamworth Aboriginal Medical Service (TAMS) has an audacious plan to debut its new dental van: to craft 15,000 mouthguards at the Koori Knockout in Bathurst, over the October Long Weekend.
The Koori Knockout is the largest Indigenous sporting event of the year, attracting around 150 Indigenous rugby league teams from across the state. Now in its fifty-second year, it is both a significant sporting and cultural event, with over 30,000 people attending, many from the New England. The Narwan Eels have won the competition five times, while the Moree Boomerangs have won twice.
“We’ve been invited to the Knockout to provide a mouthguard service,” Executive Assistant to the TAMS CEO Kevin Duroux said, “in partnership with NSW Health and the Western Sydney University.”
The plan is ambitious, and WSU will be providing staff and students to help make the mouthguards. Duroux is proud to be working with his alma mater.
“They’re invested in Aboriginal health,” he said, “not only in being able to fund and provide services, but training as well.”
Two dozen people will be involved, and Duroux is busy with the challenges of finding accommodation for them all on a busy weekend in Bathurst, as well finding enough stock and supplies to crank out 15,000 mouthguards.
“There’ll be 21 people who can make the mouthguards – twenty of them are students, and I have a really, really good working relationship with Dr. Ismail Larney, who will be leading the students throughout the weekend.”
Even with that number of staff on hand, it would be impossible to make the mouthguards the traditional way.
Instead, TAMS is turning to 3D printing to greatly speed up the work.
“What we’ve proposed – and it’s part of the reason we have such a high target – is to have some 3D printers on-site, in van operating,” Duroux said.
“Essentially, a patient will come in, have a scan done, and then the printer will begin to print that model for them.”
“It’s fairly new technology. I haven’t seen this before.”
Not everyone can afford a mouthguard, and while “boil and bite” mouthguards are better than nothing they cannot compare to one made by dental professionals.
“To play without a mouthguard, to cop an injury to your mouth, could be devastating both mentally and physically.”
TAMS has only had the dental van for a number of months. It’s set up as a dental technician lab, designed to be able to make dental prostheses like dentures and plates, as well as mouthguards.
The plan is to take the van on the road, and provide services to any and all Indigenous communities in the region, though Duroux says that if the van were fully funded and equipped there’s no limit on where he’d like to see it go.
“With enough time and resources, it has the potential to be mobile and be at any site.”
TAMS has received seed funding from the Centre for Oral Health to get the project started, and for now, the van is parked in Tamworth with the equipment inside being used to make prosthetics.
The Koori Knockout will be its first away game, so to speak.
Duroux, who was a former dental technician himself before moving into an administrative role at TAMS, sees providing oral health as key to overall health, and for the past three years has been in charge of getting oral health services going at TAMS, though he says that they’ve had a vision for oral health for much longer.
“Through all of my study and all of my training that I’ve done in oral health, it’s prominent that health in general starts at oral health.
“If you have bad, or declining oral health, that affects your overall health.”
Top image: Kevin Duroux with the new TAMS dental van. (Tom Plevey)
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