Nurse practitioner Nancy Ronan has been employed by Correct Care Solutions to serve as the inmate medical provider at the Columbia County Jail in St. Helens, Oregon. She is not a dentist, dental assistant, or hygienist. I believe that she is a general medical nurse practitioner with no dental training that I know of, so why does she try to act like a dental professional at work? The policy of Columbia County is to send inmates to a dentist in an emergency and only for an extraction. Since the jail has no dental professional on staff, the job falls on Nancy to determine if an extraction is needed and an emergency exists. As a result she feels entitled to offer dental advice to inmates that is not based on the dental needs of the patient. It is just a justification for providing as little care as possible while trying to sound dentally sound. Dentally sound to the deaf perhaps.
I found this out in 2018 when I had a broken filling on a tooth that had had a root canal a couple years before, but did not yet have a permanent crown. All I needed was a new filling and eventually a permanent crown. She looked into my mouth with a little flashlight while I was standing in a lit room and said that a dentist would pull that tooth. I asked "you are not a dentist, so how do you know what a dentist would do?" She answered that she had worked with dentists and that they pull teeth. I then said "you do know that fixing teeth is most of their job, right?" She responded with "not when you are in jail."
Later that year I was released and went to a real dentist. That real dentist agreed with me that all I needed was a new filling and eventually a permanent crown. Notably, he commented that the tooth was in pretty good shape despite still having a temporary crown for a couple years. He never suggested pulling it, I got the new filling, and it feels fine. I owe my tooth to not listening to Nancy. If she had her way I would not be on the loose with my tooth.