COOK- The Scenic Rivers Dental Clinic in Cook is back in partial operation again after suffering extensive damage from the June flood, but more work remains before the clinic is back at full capacity.
The clinic is operating with four of its original nine stations, according to Scenic Rivers Health Services CEO Keith Harvey, and both staff and patients are glad to be back.
“We’re real happy about that,” Harvey said. “That was huge to get that as quickly as we could. We don’t have doors on all the doorways, we still have a lot of flooring that needs to get put in, and we have some painting that still needs to be done, but we were able to get up and running.”
Bringing staff back from their alternate location assignments during the closure has perhaps been the easiest part of reopening, but getting patients reconnected with their dental care home with fewer than half the chairs has been a challenge, Harvey said.
“It’s been a bit of a nightmare, actually, but it’s coming,” he said. “Geri Pylka is our receptionist, and she’s so good at doing the juggling and plugging people in and getting it going. There are a lot of people who got delayed and some people probably didn’t get the care when they needed it, but it’s moving forward pretty well right now.”
The restart didn’t happen soon enough to bring in a pair of University of Minnesota dental students who were scheduled for short internships this summer, but Harvey said it could be possible to accommodate them a few months from now.
When complete, the main operating area will have seven chairs, with specialty rooms for pediatric care and a lift for physically-challenged patients.
“It’s our goal to get those up as soon as possible,” Harvey said.
Scenic Rivers had insurance that covered some of the damage to the building, and they burned through that quickly.
“We definitely had some insurance coverage, but it went really fast – with the flooring and the walls and the cleanup that got eaten up pretty quickly,” Harvey said.
Additional help has come from the Department of Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation, which provided $25,000, and the Delta Dental Foundation of Minnesota, which gave $20,000.
“And we have a couple of other things we’re looking at, like a Small Business Administration relief fund loan in conjunction with FEMA, but those are things that take time,” Harvey said. “We’ll just have to wait and see how that plays out. We also made application with an organization called Direct Relief that works very closely with federally qualified health centers in the country, and they may be able to provide something similar to the IRRRB or Delta Dental. We keep looking for places where we can get additional funding because otherwise it comes out of our operating budget, and we’re not rolling in money.”
As with other businesses, the damage to the building and equipment is only part of the challenge for Scenic Rivers— it has also a considerable amount of operating revenue from being closed. Harvey estimated the combined losses to be in the neighborhood of $500,000.
Harvey did not provide an estimated date for when the clinic would be fully operational.