Janet Reaves was a tireless advocate for North Carolinians, working statewide to improve the health of those with chronic disease. Janet excelled at creating partnerships and helped champion innovative quality improvement initiatives that put North Carolina at the forefront in of chronic disease management.
In her memory, and to highlight the connection between oral and systemic health, the North Carolina Oral Health Collaborative sponsored the first Janet Reaves Community Achievement Award this year.
The award was initially supposed to be presented during lunch at the North Carolina Community Health Center Association’s Clinical Conference on Quality and Chronic Disease in April, but the conference was cancelled due to COVID-19.
Instead, we met virtually with this year’s awardee, Dr. Rob Doherty, chief dental officer at Greene County Health Care Inc., to discuss his lifetime of service and what the award means to him.
Dr. Doherty is an innovator in the field of community-based dentistry. Throughout his career, he has worked hard to increase access to quality oral health care for underserved communities. From spearheading new approaches to school-based dentistry to pushing the envelope to offer more services from a public health setting, Dr. Doherty has shown that hard work, dedication, and collaboration can achieve incredible results.
Watch the full interview with Dr. Doherty or use the table of contents below to skip to specific topics of interest to you.
Table of Contents
0:15 – About the Janet Reaves Community Achivement Award
1:10 – About Dr. Rob Doherty
5:32 – Opening the Janet Reaves Award
8:31 – Choosing dentistry and public health
11:00 –Coming to North Carolina for farm worker dentistry
12:10 – Back to school
12:40 – Impacting the community in Greene County
13:25 – Innovating the workplace: adding orthodontics to a public health clinic
17:25 – Three requests: open the doors, offer comprehensive dentistry (18:35), and create a teaching environment (20:24)
21:39 – Bringing residents to Greene County
22:34 – Local health department roles in oral health care
24:25 – Collaborating with community
27:22 – Keeping the flame lit: mentorship and sustaining safety-net dentistry
31:44 – Innovating the workplace: school-based care
33:43 – Working on a shared vision: restorative dentistry in a mobile clinic
37:33 – Advice to dentists in public health
