© 2024 WGCU News
PBS and NPR for Southwest Florida
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

The Florida Dental Association Foundation Will Provide Free Dental Care in Lee County

Florida Dental Association Foundation

The Florida Dental Association Foundation will host its fourth Florida Mission of Mercy event on March 9-10 at the Lee Civic Center in Fort Myers. During the event dentists will provide an estimated 2,000 people with relief from the pain and infection of untreated dental disease — all at no cost to the patients.

Dental care will be delivered on a first-come, first-served basis from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. with no pre-registration necessary. Services provided will include cleanings, fillings, extractions, pediatric dentistry and limited root canal therapy. We're joined by Dr. Phillip Kraver, one of the dentists providing care at this weekend's events, to learn more.

 
The 2018 FLA-MOM event is still in need of volunteers, including licensed dental and medical professionals, EMTs, and general community volunteers to serve as patient escorts or translators, assist with registration, help set-up and break-down the event space, etc.
 
The event is held in a different location each year. Previous FLA-MOM events held in Tampa, Jacksonville and Pensacola provided a total of more than 6,200 patients with donated dental care valued at more than $5.5 million.

Rachel Iacovone is a reporter and associate producer of Gulf Coast Live for WGCU News. Rachel came to WGCU as an intern in 2016, during the presidential race. She went on to cover Florida Gulf Coast University students at President Donald Trump's inauguration on Capitol Hill and Southwest Floridians in attendance at the following day's Women's March on Washington.Rachel was first contacted by WGCU when she was managing editor of FGCU's student-run media group, Eagle News. She helped take Eagle News from a weekly newspaper to a daily online publication with TV and radio branches within two years, winning the 2016 Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award for Best Use of Multimedia in a cross-platform series she led for National Coming Out Day. She also won the Mark of Excellence Award for Feature Writing for her five-month coverage of an FGCU student's transition from male to female.As a WGCU reporter, she produced the first radio story in WGCU's Curious Gulf Coast project, which answered the question: Does SWFL Have More Cases of Pediatric Cancer?Rachel graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University with a bachelor's degree in journalism.