Contact: Jacquelyn Spruce
Phone: (210) 567-0414
E-mail: sprucej@uthscsa.edu

Dr. Renner performs an emergency extraction on a child in Central America. Because there is no electricity, he has to treat each patient using only a flashlight.
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After almost 40 years as a dentist, Robert Renner, D.D.S., Health Science Center volunteer clinical professor, says his active volunteerism has become the most rewarding time of his life.

Dr. Renner volunteers in the Health Science Center’s department of prosthodontics two-and-a-half days each week. When he’s not assisting the San Antonio community, you can bet he’s somewhere in Central America. As an active member of Save the Children, Dr. Renner was able to start a dental prevention program in El Salvador two years ago. He travels to the country twice a year, examining about 700 children from age two to 12, and provides them with prevention aids such as coloring books and brushing techniques.

“I see some 125 children per day, six days a week,” Dr. Renner said. “And, I do emergency extractions and fillings on as many children as I can. I treat them with a flashlight and no running water in one-room school houses. But, nothing else I have done in dentistry can compare to the face of a little child getting a great first-time checkup, a box of crayons, a coloring book and a ‘high five.’”

Dr. Renner said the program is at its maximum size right now because he sees the same children every six months. “Some children grow up and leave the program, allowing new toddlers to enter,” he said.

He is commencing another program this month that he initiated in Guatemala in July 2005.

“This program is for about 650 children of Mayan descent in Quiche Province in the Mayan Highlands,” Dr. Renner said. “So, I currently visit Central America four times a year to assist more than three thousand children.”

His love and enthusiasm for his work have changed thousands of lives. Although Save the Children provides the logistics to the sites where he works and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funds the school houses, Dr. Renner pays for all his own travel expenses and dental supplies for each visit.

Dr. Renner became an active volunteer with Save the Children in 1968 when he sponsored an American Indian on the Navajo reservation. This sponsorship increased to two children in a decade and then in the late 1990s to ten children.

“I feel truly blessed to be able to provide care to those children who would otherwise never receive any dental care,” he said.

Save the Children wishes to expand Dr. Renner’s positive health program to other countries that Save the Children serves.

“My experiences have further strengthened my commitment to dental volunteerism,” Dr. Renner said. “Improving the dental health of these forgotten people may be a small thing in the scheme of the world-health crisis for children. But, I feel that by touching the lives of some 4,000 children and their parents in these countries, I have provided hope and basic dental care for them – where none has existed before.”