Alumna-led Sawtooth Mountain Task Force receives Rural Health Award

An effort spearheaded by a School of Dentistry alumna is receiving accolades for its impact on oral health care in rural Minnesota.

Alyssa Hedstrom, DDS ’04, owns a practice first opened by her father, Rolf E Lindquist, a DDS ’77 graduate, in Northern Minnesota. A fierce believer in serving her community, she joined the North Shore Health Care Foundation in an effort to make a difference in her small community. 

It started with conversations with  co-creator Paul Nelson and a visit to an oral health summit in St. Paul. “I just thought, we are this very small community. Let’s do things differently,” she recalled. “Let’s just go to the schools and look in kids’ mouths, and then see how much decay there is.” 

That simple idea to do things differently became the Sawtooth Mountain Oral Health Task Force–an effort that allows Hedsdtrom and the team to visit schools in her area, identify needs and make connections with those families to establish a dental home at her clinic. 

“We saw this need of identifying the gap between screenings in schools and getting people into the dental office,” she said. “Our community is small enough that we can identify those needs and then bring them to our clinic. Our goal has always been to identify barriers to care and solve them.” 

The task force serves all families in Cook County and the Grand Portage Reservation with and without insurance. It began as a program for kids under age 18, then grew to include individuals aged 26 and younger, 65 and older and pregnant individuals. 

So far, the task force is doing its job–and seeing results. “The more screenings we do, the more kids we get in and the less overall decay we see,” she explained. “Then, there’s less work for us to do.” 

These results and the impact on the community led to a 2024 Rural Minnesota Health Award for the task force. Announced on National Rural Health Day, these awards honor people and groups “who have made a significant impact on improving rural health in Minnesota.” 

That’s exactly what Hedstrom and the task force hope to do–and she’s proud of the work they’ve accomplished. “It feels like a great acknowledgement of a lot of years of hard work,” she said. “I live in the community that I serve, and it’s important to me to be creative and find solutions to ensure that the kids in my community can get care.” 

And the task force has reminded Hedstrom of the importance of bringing together multiple perspectives. “Dentistry is important, and having a dentist do the work is an important part of this, but my work is supported by all these people with different backgrounds and skill sets–people who write grants, build relationships, perform the screenings and make connections,” she said. “This is about connecting with our community, and we have the right people. They’re all so important in making this successful.”