From Dentistry To Public Health: Making Care More Accessible

In a government hospital in Bangladesh, Sanchita Sultana met patients with serious oral conditions who sometimes needed surgery. Some asked only for free pain medication because they couldn’t afford the treatment they needed.

Those encounters changed the direction of her career. Trained as a dentist, Sultana moved into epidemiology to understand how prevention and public health could reach people before a treatable condition became a crisis.

Her work in Michigan has since shown her that a very different healthcare system can produce a similar result. Treatment and prevention may exist, but Sultana has seen how cost, coverage, trust, information, and household circumstances determine whether people can actually use them.

When Pain Relief Was The Only Affordable Choice

Sultana was a medical consultant in the initial consultation area of a government hospital’s oral and maxillofacial department. She assessed patients, documented their treatment needs, and transferred them to a clinical team, while also referring severe oral lesions to a specialized hospital when hers lacked treatment capacity.

For people who couldn’t pay, a referral changed little. Patients asked for free medication offering short-term relief because medicine, injections, hospital treatment, and recommended surgery required out-of-pocket payment.

She knew the clinical recommendation, yet saw why a patient might feel unable to follow it. “I felt so bad. I couldn’t even sleep that night because I was thinking about how they were forced to make that hard decision. Even if the treatment exists, they choose to go without it simply because they could not afford it.”

Looking Beyond One Patient At A Time

Those encounters led Sultana to consider how she could help before disease became severe. She entered a public health program in Bangladesh and completed a master’s in epidemiology focused on prevention and health education. Early research also exposed limited resources and support.

When COVID-19 halted dental work, she completed Bangladesh government training in contact tracing and spent a year and a half at a COVID-dedicated hospital under safety protocols. After receiving a scholarship, Sultana moved to Michigan to study in 2021. She completed an MPH and entered the field of U.S. public health.

Her studies connected risk assessment, resource management, education, and access to care, giving her a population-level way to pursue that concern. “What gave me a passion for public health was moving from individual patients to the community,” she explains. “I wanted to reach people in the community who might never have visited a clinic. I could not go door to door and warn them, but through targeted public health campaigns, I can help people understand the consequences of certain behaviors and give them the knowledge they need to protect their health before it’s too late.”

A Different System With Different Obstacles

During graduate-assistant work in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, Sultana recognized a familiar outcome within a different healthcare system. Uninsured and underinsured people sometimes avoided hospital care because they feared the bill. She also encountered health disparities, uncertainty about coverage, mistrust of healthcare institutions, and concerns about vaccination.

“People may not be able to get treatment due to insurance issues. For those who are uninsured or underinsured, a fear of receiving a big hospital bill can lead them to choose not to go to the hospital for the care they need.”

That concern now shapes Sultana’s work as an epidemiologist in Michigan. Alongside surveillance of respiratory diseases, sexually transmitted diseases, hepatitis C, and elevated blood lead levels among children, she analyzes data and produces reports that inform local decisions. She also leads access-to-care planning, using those findings to help identify the barriers residents face and guide practical community responses.

Sultana meets monthly with community and organizational partners to define county objectives, review progress, and identify action items and manageable steps. She says limited funding, mistrust, and fear can complicate that work. When people question vaccination, counseling and education can help them understand the recommendation and make an informed decision. Listening is essential because the reason care feels inaccessible can change from one household to another.

Why Every Household Changes The Question

When recounting her time in Bangladesh, the immediate financial obstacle she saw her patients often face was clear: patients had to pay for treatment themselves and lacked the money. In Michigan, however, identifying the obstacle can take longer because every family may tell a different story. A 2025 survey of more than 1,300 Michigan adults reflects that variation, where 65% said they or a family member had delayed or skipped care because of cost, while respondents also cited difficulty getting an appointment, lack of insurance, and inability to take time off work.

Household size can affect what is manageable, and insurance coverage may differ among members of the same family. For an older adult, the most urgent need may be help obtaining food.

The research question changes with the situation and with what community members say they need, even when access to care remains the central concern. Partner meetings turn those accounts into local priorities, action items, and smaller steps responsive to stated needs.

“We need a different approach to help every family,” says Sultana. “Here, the barriers and needs vary more than I saw before. Back home, almost the entire community was dealing with the same fundamental problems.”

For Sultana, effective community work starts with finding the practical obstacle facing a particular family. A shared county objective becomes useful through responses grounded in what residents actually describe.

The Thread That Leads Back To Tobacco

Tobacco remains a secondary thread through Sultana’s career. Her interest began in dentistry and her experience with tobacco-related cancer. During her MPH, she discussed that clinical experience with a professor and made tobacco and tobacco-related cancers the subject of her master’s thesis. After moving to the United States, she continued that research, co-authoring a 2025 systematic review of barriers to tobacco-cessation programs as well as a paper showing how different interlinking factors can influence a person’s ability to successfully quit tobacco.

In health education, Sultana developed chronic-disease education materials for older adults and school-age children, including tobacco-related topics. Her county epidemiology work covers chronic and infectious diseases and information on tobacco-related deaths.

Regarding how she wants to expand the reach of peer education, she says, “I want to work more closely with K–12 schools so we can help students in the first place and prevent them from starting to smoke. They should already understand why smoking is harmful before they start.”

This work reinforces a lesson from the rest of her career: information matters when people can understand it, trust it, and use it. Prevention requires reaching people early while paying attention to the support surrounding a health decision.

When Available Care Becomes Usable Care

Sanchita Sultana’s work brings several parts of public health into the same view. Disease surveillance can identify concerns, education can make recommendations clearer, and local partnerships can reveal the circumstances that keep a family from acting. Her experience with health disparities, tobacco prevention, and community planning shows why no single response will fit every person.

Readers can apply the same test to treatment and prevention where they live. Is it affordable, understandable, trusted, reachable, and practical for the people it is meant to serve?

For Sultana, the answer begins with listening closely to why someone can’t take the next step, then using research, education, and local coordination to make that step more realistic before a preventable problem becomes a crisis.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not substitute for professional medical advice. If you are seeking medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, please consult a medical professional or healthcare provider.

BDG Media newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.