Looking Back on Our First-ever Prickly Pear Community Care Event
Way back in June, we announced something that we had been discussing internally since virtually the earliest days of Prickly Pear Dental Care: our first-ever Prickly Pear Community Care event, during which we would open on a Saturday and spend the morning providing completely free dental care to members of our Borderland community.
On August 8, after a couple of months of planning, organizing, spreading the word, and admittedly wondering what exactly we had gotten ourselves into, we finally got to see the idea become a reality! Over the course of the morning, we treated 16 patients and provided $5,970+ worth of dental care to members of our community, completely free of charge. The services provided ranged from exams and cleanings to fillings and extractions, and we’re genuinely proud of ourselves, our staff, and our incredible team of volunteers for making it happen.
Of course, sixteen patients and approximately $6,000 are relatively small numbers when compared with the enormous need for affordable dental care that exists here in El Paso and throughout our wider Borderland region. We aren’t under the illusion that we “solved” any problem during this single morning of work, but that was never really the point. For us, the goal of Prickly Pear Community Care was first and foremost to show up for our community.
We talk all the time about being a local dental practice—pretty much to anybody who will listen! But to us, this means far more than simple geography. From our perspective, being local doesn’t just describe where our office is, or even just that Dr. Flores’s name is the one on our ownership documents. When we describe ourselves as a local office, what we’re ultimately saying is that we couldn’t exist if El Pasoans didn’t show up to support us, and that therefore we have a certain degree of responsibility to support El Pasoans right back.
This responsibility takes a lot of different forms, and obviously, for practical reasons, it can’t consist of providing free dental care every weekend! We’re still a very new practice, and we have employees to pay, rent and bills to cover, supplies to buy, equipment to maintain, and all of the other often unglamorous realities that come along with keeping a small business alive. But we also don’t think that being unable to do everything is ever a compelling reason to do nothing, and that’s why we’re so happy that our very first Prickly Pear Community Care event was a success.
The ability to host this sort of event is also among the things that we most value about one of our other guiding principles: our independence. First of all, we want to make it totally clear that this isn’t meant as a knock on any larger group practices, or even necessarily the larger, corporate/DSO model. There are certainly good dentists and ethical owners working within those frameworks, so we don’t mean to paint with too broad a brush! But being independent does mean that when we decide something matters to us, we’re able to act on it. Nobody sitting in an office hundreds or thousands of miles away had to approve Prickly Pear Community Care. We didn’t have to justify it as a marketing expense, prove that it would generate a certain number of new patients, or explain how giving away an entire morning of dentistry would contribute to some corporation’s quarterly numbers. We thought it was something worth doing, so we did it.
That kind of freedom is a big part of what we mean when we talk about wanting Prickly Pear Dental Care to remain a genuinely local, independent practice. We want the decisions we make about this office—whether they involve how we treat our patients, how we treat our staff, the organizations we support, or how we participate in our local community—to reflect our actual values. And at the end of the day, Prickly Pear Community Care was just one, relatively small expression of them.
None of this, of course, would have been possible without the people who actually spent their Saturday morning making it happen! We are incredibly grateful to our staff and to everyone who volunteered. We’re also grateful to our sponsors, which included Patterson Dental, Benco Dental, Dentsply Sirona, VOCO, Smile Straight Orthodontics, and the office of Dr. Michael Najera. Thank you all for your kindness and generosity, which ultimately made this day possible for the sixteen patients who received dental care completely free of charge here in our office. Finally, we’re also grateful for those sixteen patients themselves. For some, their visits were relatively simple. For others, they involved relatively major treatment that they’d been putting off, or simply had not been in a position to receive, for quite a while. Either way, we’re glad that, for at least one morning, the question of what somebody could afford didn’t have to enter into the conversation at all!
When we were first putting Prickly Pear Dental Care together, “Community” was one of the five values that we chose to place at the center of the practice. At the time, this was mostly an expression of the kind of office that we hoped to one day become. Events like this are an opportunity to start turning that aspiration into something a little more tangible.
So no, one Saturday morning did not change the world, and helping sixteen patients did not solve the larger problem of access to dental care here in El Paso. But sixteen of our neighbors received needed care, our team got to spend a morning doing something we all felt genuinely good about, and Prickly Pear Dental Care became just a little bit more like the practice we hoped it would be when we started all of this. For a first-ever Prickly Pear Community Care event, we’ll happily call that a success.
And, perhaps most importantly, we don’t plan for it to be our last!
—Jim & Dr. Flores