Posted on Leave a comment

The Distinction Between Services Offered Now and Services Later, Illustrated by the HRSA Oral Health Service Expansion (OHSE) Program

When you’re writing a proposal for a grant intended to expand an existing program or service, it is extremely, ridiculously important to distinguish between what your organization is currently doing and what it’ll be doing with the new money. Failure to do so means that a) you raise the specter of supplantation, b) you sound like you don’t need the money because you’re already offering the services, and c) someone with a better grant story will get the money. Applying for a grant leads to a binary outcome—either you get the grant or you don’t. There are no half grants.

Let’s use HRSA’s Oral Health Service Expansion (OHSE) Program as an example. As the name of the program implies, OHSE is designed to provide additional dental services to underserved low-income patients.* A good OHSE proposal describes what, if anything, the applicant is currently doing with respect to oral health services (e.g., no services, pediatric only, pregnant women only, Medicaid only, etc.), and then describes what will be done differently. The applicant should say what additional services will be offered (e.g., sealants for children, dentures, etc.), and show how the dental patient population will be expanded. The applicant might serve additional existing FQHC medical patients, other service area residents, left-handed one-eyed cyclops, and so on.

A reasonable expansion might be as simple as saying, “The Toppenish Community Health Center currently serves 2,000 patients with 4,000 dental visits annually. The OHSE grant will allow TCHC to serve 3,000 high-risk patients, including at least ten cyclops.” What the organization can’t do, however, is claim that the CHC already serves 2,000 patients, and the grant will allow the CHC to keep serving those patients with more or less the same services. Patients have to be served in either greater number or greater services, or both.

Many  FQHCs that seek OHSE grants will also have long waiting lists, which can be used to bolster need: If the current waiting list for a new dental appointment is six months, that indicates a severe shortage of oral health service capacity. It doesn’t held your proposal to say proudly that the CHC’s wait time for a new dental patient is two days.

In short, applicants shouldn’t ever write or imply that they won’t actually serve more patients, or a larger area, or provide additional services. This may seem obvious, but we’ve seen proposals written by others that fail to remember this rule and that are primarily boasts about how much they’re already doing. That flaw won’t always be fatal—the funder may just want to fund that particular applicant or that particular service area—but it should still be avoided.


* Fun fact: Some dentists prefer the term “oral cavity” rather than “mouth.” I’m not sure why, since to me the former term sounds vaguely pornographic, and the latter term sounds normal.