Cynthia Lord | Nexus Summit 2023

Cynthia Lord, MHS, PA-C

Volunteer Primary Care Clinician and Preceptor

Lake County Free Clinic

Cindy has spent much of her 32-year career working in both primary care and academia. Currently, Cindy works as a volunteer primary care clinician and preceptor at the Lake County Free Clinic in Painesville, Ohio. She also serves on their board of directors as the vice-president.

A PA educator for 29 years, Cindy has spent most of her time as a PA program director. She helped develop the Quinnipiac University PA program in 1994 and served as program director until 2015. In 2015, she went on to become the founding director of the Case Western Reserve University PA Program where she served as associate professor until June 2023.

A passionate advocate for oral health integration in education and practice, Cindy is an active PA “oral health champion”. Under her leadership, both Quinnipiac and Case Western Reserve had oral health fully integrated into the PA curriculum. She has also helped develop numerous community-based oral health experiences including a collaboration with Case Western Reserve University dental medicine and the PA program to enhance the relationship and the bi-directional referral process between physician assistant students and dental residents.

Cindy has served on numerous oral health advisory boards including the National Interprofessional Initiative on Oral Health (NIIOH), the national PA Oral Health Advisory Group, and the Connecticut Oral Health Initiative (COHI). Cindy was also a participant and contributor to the 2014 HRSA Oral Health Competencies.

Currently, Cindy serves on the board of directors for Oral Health Ohio and is the Ohio oral health champion for the Center for Integration of Primary Care and Oral Health (CIPCOH) 100 Million Mouths Campaign (MMC). In her role as a 100 MMC oral health champion, Cindy helps Ohio health professions programs integrate oral health into their curriculum. As part of her work with MMC, Cindy and an interprofessional team of colleagues have created an oral health newsletter for health professions educators. Distributed monthly, Oral Health Fillings, Bits and Bites provides educators with current oral health topics, strategies on how to teach the material along with practical oral health resources.

Cindy’s scholarship includes numerous presentations, abstracts, and poster presentations around oral health and interprofessional education.

Presenting at the Nexus Summit:

Working Together to Advance Health Equity: Integrating Oral Health Across Interprofessional Education and Practice

Life has often been described as a series of defining moments. Moments that have been used to illustrate how certain events in our lives shape who we have become and the future trajectory of our lives. For the third of our population who systematically had limited access to oral care and continue to suffer from social and economic barriers leading to persistent inequality, for these and countless others, their defining moments are different. They consist of many barriers that prevent underserved and disadvantaged populations from accessing quality health care services. Barriers that…