Section 1971.

For the purposes of this article, the following terms have the following meanings:

(a) "Board" means the Dental Board of California.

(b) "Office" means the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development.

(c) "Program" means the California Dental Corps Loan Repayment Program.

(d) "Dentally underserved area" means a geographic area eligible to be designated as having a shortage of dental professionals pursuant to Part I of Appendix B to Part 5 of Chapter 1 of Title 42 of the Code of Federal Regulations or an area of the state where unmet priority needs for dentists exist as determined by the California Healthcare Workforce Policy Commission pursuant to Section 128224 of the Health and Safety Code.

(e) "Dentally underserved population" means persons without dental insurance and persons eligible for the Denti-Cal and Healthy Families Programs who are population groups described as having a shortage of dental care professionals in Part I of Appendix B to Part 5 of Chapter 1 of Title 42 of the Code of Federal Regulations.

(f) "Practice setting" means either of the following:

(1) A community clinic, as defined in subdivision (a) of Section 1204 and subdivision (c) of Section 1206 of the Health and Safety Code, a clinic owned or operated by a public hospital and health system, or a clinic owned and operated by a hospital that maintains the primary contract with a county government to fulfill the county's role pursuant to Section 17000 of the Welfare and Institutions Code, which is located in a dentally underserved area and at least 50 percent of whose patients are from a dentally underserved population.

(2) A dental practice or dental corporation, as defined in Section 1800 of this code, located in a dentally underserved area and at least 50 percent of whose patients are from a dentally underserved population.

(g) "Medi-Cal threshold languages" means primary languages spoken by limited-English-proficient (LEP) population groups meeting a numeric threshold of 3,000, eligible LEP Medi-Cal beneficiaries residing in a county, 1,000 Medi-Cal eligible LEP beneficiaries residing in a single ZIP Code, or 1,500 LEP Medi-Cal beneficiaries residing in two contiguous ZIP Codes.

(h) "Fund" means the State Dentistry Fund.

(i) "Account" means the Dentally Underserved Account which is contained within the fund.

(Amended by Stats. 2003, Ch. 582, Sec. 1. Effective January 1, 2004.)