A DENTIST has set on off a mission of more than 2,700 miles with the sole purpose of bringing smiles to the faces of the people of Ukraine.

Principal dentist at Freshbrook Dental Practice, Brendon Ball, left Cricklade on Tuesday to begin the road trip to deliver a mobile dental clinic to the eastern European country.

This is the third mobile clinic that Brendan has delivered to the country, with the previous two having already treated 34,000 people since 2006.

Along with wife Natasha and mechanic Herbie Trinder, of Elm Tree Motor Co, Marlborough, they began their journey across Europe with the portakabin-sized clinic on Tuesday afternoon.

“We’re all old enough to know better,” said Brendon, who will be making the journey for the sixth time – having previously delivered the last two clinics as well.

He was inspired to offer aid to the country in the late 1990s along with Swindon orthodontist Richard Swift after realising that much of the country’s health budget was being directed towards cancer treatment in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster. This, they believed, was causing dental disease to treble.

He said: “Dentists usually score pretty negative press about pretty much anything.

"In the usual confluence of circumstances I found myself offering my services to a dental aid charity.

"But I was really keen to see the equipment get to where it was meant to be, and under my own steam. We thought we could do it better and on our own, and it took off from there.”

The pair founded the charity Smile Menders and have been fundraising to provide dental care to the people of Ukraine ever since.

He said: “We could see how desperate their needs were in terms of the decay rates – they were ten times higher than they were here in Swindon.

"When we wrote the decay figures down for our area and showed the dentists in Ukraine they thought we had put the decimal point in the wrong place - their experience was so much different from our own.

“We brought some of the directors over and showed them how it works over here. We gave them the ideas about education leaflets and they have whole-heartedly taken the message of preventative care.

"I think the nicest thing for us is that the Ukrainian government decided to use the model that we had started and spread it out over Ukraine.

“The situation there has changed rather drastically recently and a certain amount of the stuff we have taken is being taken in military field hospitals, which means the civilian population is missing out.

"We are hoping that this new clinic will help.”

This latest clinic came from Solihull Health Authority and has undergone a complete refit with all of the necessary equipment to allow the Ukrainian dentists to carry out procedures on their patients.

Brendon revealed that while the patients were undergoing treatments they would be gazing up at Stonehenge.

He said: “I have put a picture of Stonehenge on the ceiling for the patients to look at, I want them to know that this has come from the people of Wiltshire.”