Amplifying Voices: Bridging the Gap in Dental Care for Single Mothers  Facing Financial Insecurity

Authored by: Staria Joseph, Céline Lenherr and Nazihah Noor
Edited by: Ella Kuffour, Emily Lynott, and Natalie Harrison Messerli

Single mothers are often stretched thin - navigating work, raising children, and managing their finances, all while trying to prioritize their health. Yet dental care remains an overlooked necessity. In Switzerland, dental services are excluded from basic health insurance plans, placing them out of reach for many families experiencing financial precarity.

While low-income families are covered through the existing social security system, those living just above the threshold for social welfare support are often left vulnerable. They earn "too much" to qualify for assistance but not enough to cover out-of-pocket dental costs.

Imagine a single mother facing these choices: prioritizing her children's clothes or school supplies over her own dental care. Regular dental check-ups become a luxury she can't afford. Over time, minor dental issues escalate, and when urgent care is finally unavoidable, the high costs risk pushing her family into debt.

This scenario, familiar to many single mothers in Switzerland, reveals a critical gap in our healthcare system, one we aim to address through a Learning Health Systems approach.

Partnering for Change: From Community Voices to Action

In the Advancing Health Equity in Learning Health Systems course, we learned that creating equitable systems requires continuous learning from communities, not just about them.

Building on this principle, our design challenge project seeks to amplify the voices of single mothers and turn their lived experiences into actionable, community-driven interventions. By partnering with support organizations that already have trusting relationships with single mothers, we could aim to open authentic channels for dialogue. Through surveys and focus groups, we could learn about the barriers these women face, not only financial hurdles but also logistical challenges like scheduling, transportation, and culturally relevant care.

This feedback is not simply collected; it actively informs the design of a pilot program aimed at increasing dental care access for those living on the cusp of financial insecurity. Solutions emerging from this type of engagement could potentially include referral systems, dental care vouchers, and community-driven outreach strategies designed alongside the women who will use them.

Our proposed work would embrace the core Learning Health Systems cycle: gathering data from community partners, applying that learning to interventions, and continuously refining based on feedback all while centering health equity.

Sustaining Voices Beyond a Single Project

Recognizing that community engagement should not be a one-time effort, we conceptualized a community newsletter sharing single mothers’ experiences with dental care access. This strategy reflects a key lesson from the course: that amplifying community narratives sustains dialogue, builds deeper trust, and fosters collective action toward systemic change.

By embedding storytelling into ongoing outreach, we would aim to shift public perceptions, influence policy discussions, and most importantly, ensure that single mothers’ needs remain visible and prioritized within health system transformation efforts.