Fixing kids’ teeth outside the city
Meet the 40 Under 40 Award winner who charted her own path after experiencing heartbreaking miscarriages.
After spending years of her career as a clinician in both the public and private health sectors, Dr Gabrielle Smart established the first paediatric dental facility located outside of metropolitan Adelaide back in 2023.
The decision to open Hills and Country Paediatric Dentistry in Hahndorf came during the global Covid-19 pandemic, with Smart inspired to forge her own path shaped by burnout and pregnancy loss.
“I’d had three miscarriages at 33 years old, and I was just overworked. I’d been on call seven days a week for half of the year at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital,” Smart said.
“I couldn’t ever dream up doing something like this, particularly not in the position we were in during Covid.”
But after receiving funding approval for a new clinic, Smart opened the Hahndorf facility just six months after having her second child.
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To separate her clinic from other private dental practices, Smart has incorporated a bulk billing scheme that allows children to access private services who may not normally be able to.
The Medicare Child Dental Benefits Schedule is a government program providing up to $1100 in benefits for basic dental services over a two-year period for eligible children aged up to 17.
Smart said she made the decision to bulk bill the benefit to treat as many children as possible for no cost to the parents.
“We found that as a bit of a niche as something we wanted to be able to incorporate into our practice,” she said.
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“Even though it was a private service, we wanted to be accessible for patients that maybe had this scheme that thought they couldn’t have treatment in private practice otherwise.
“A lot of specialist practices just don’t accept it at all, which means that there’s a lot of kids that have this entitlement sitting there that they haven’t been able to use.”
The clinic provides a range of diagnostic, radiographic, preventative, restorative and minor surgical services including trauma management for children of all ages, with access to happy gas and general anaesthesia.
Smart said her business was not an overnight success, sacrificing her own salary for the first year of working.
“I just had to be all in and have faith it would work itself out. I’d say we’re now 40 per cent up on what we projected in a three-year projection that we did when we started,” she said.
The next chapter for the Hills and Country Paediatric Dentistry clinic includes expanding into a new property within the next 12 months.
Smart said it was “lovely recognition” to be awarded the 40 Under 40 Game Changer Award and demonstrated the “points of difference that the practice and the team” have tried to achieve on a social and community level.
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