HMC Restarts Dental Services

After a hiatus of a little over a year, Highland Medical Center has re-started their dental department, and I recently spoke with their new practitioner.

“My name is Daniel Sudimack, I’m from El Paso, Texas where I spent the last eight years or so.”

And what brought him to Highland County?

“Kind of a act of God, to be honest with you. I went up to visit my sister in Baltimore. Planned on staying for a couple of weeks, stayed for four days and decided I wanted to get the heck out of there and I just happened to be passing through Virginia on my way home. Got a hotel and ended up staying for about two weeks, applied for a job and here I am at HMC.”

“I am the Associate Dentist running the Dental Clinic over there. I’ve been doing dentistry for a good 12 years or so. HMC is a community health center, which is, it’s actually quite an achievement for them. It takes a lot of work to become a health center – to become Federally qualified. But I like to tell my patients, my family, my friends, everybody I know, I say go to a health center when you need a doctor, when you need a dentist, or when you need some physical therapy. Because the great thing about health centers is, you’re not going to find a single doctor on commission. Everybody’s just doing what you need, and giving you, straight up, the best care they can give you.”

He talked about what services are available.

“Anything that you can expect to get done at a general dentist’s office,  family practitioner, we do it. We’ll see kids age one month and up and up to 199 years old. And we do just about every type of dentistry there is under the sun – crowns, veneers, dentures, RPD’s, root canals, you name it, do it all.

“Most of my career since I graduated in 2010 from San Antonio, I’ve worked in community health, so I’m pretty familiar with the kinds of treatment that usually goes on in community health centers. Usually it tends to be more preventative things like fillings, fluoride treatment, extractions for patients that just want to pull the teeth they don’t want to try to try to fix them. Our Community Health Center, I like to run my Center differently. I like to make sure that we have all services available to patients, so it shouldn’t be anything different from going down to Joe Schmoe the family dentist down in Staunton just come right here and see me.”

He filled us in on staffing and hours of operation.

“Fantastic staff. Actually, you might know one of my assistants Tyler, he’s working here, I think. We have Lauren, we have Tyler, we have Emily and Megan is our hygienist. We’ve also got Shelly and Stephanie, they’re coming back. So fully staffed, ready to go. I hope to see us grow a little bit over the next couple of years.”

“Our schedule right now, we’re open Monday through Thursday. We’re gonna be there from eight o’clock to four o’clock on Mondays and Wednesdays, and then we’re there from eight o’clock to seven o’clock pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

Any last words of dental advice?

“Sure. Hey everybody, you only have to floss the teeth you want to keep.”