Santiago, Chile – September 8, 2026
Chile has no shortage of general dentists. What it lacks, outside Santiago, are specialists: orthodontists, implant specialists, periodontists, the practitioners who can deliver the more complex care Uno Salud Dental, a Linzor portfolio company, aims to provide across its nationwide network of over 100 clinics. While the supply of specialists is healthy in the capital city, in the regions, it thins out fast.
In 2021, Uno Salud Dental launched a scholarship program to close that gap directly. The program covers half the cost of a postgraduate specialty degree for young dentists who commit to working for two years at an Uno Salud clinic in the regions, typically in the far north or south of the country. Each year, Uno Salud identifies the regions and dental specialties with the most significant shortage of professionals and allocates postgraduate scholarships accordingly. Recipients are not required to work exclusively for Uno Salud during that time. Many also see patients through other private providers or the public health system in the same region, so the program’s reach goes beyond Uno Salud’s own clinics.
The program has grown quickly, attracting 89 applicants in its 2025 round, compared with 21 in its first year. Over the same period, it has received applications from dentists who are pursuing, or planning to pursue, postgraduate specialty training at 15 different universities, up from two universities represented in 2021.
To date, Uno Salud has awarded 16 scholarships and invested roughly USD 220,000, including USD 55,000 in 2025 alone. Twelve recipients are now working in Uno Salud clinics in underserved regions. Three have already completed their commitment time and chosen to stay on.
The specialists who have come through the program have since served nearly 10,000 patients and delivered more than 52,000 treatments.
Doctor Alejandro Sánchez received a scholarship in 2022 and now practices in Osorno, in southern Chile. In this video, he treats Lorena González, who was facing the loss of several teeth and was able to save her smile with dental implants.
Uno Salud’s dental scholarship program is one of the Out-of-the-Box Ideas we have encouraged across our portfolio since 2022. These are initiatives that push companies beyond their regular operations to try solutions that would not otherwise come out of day-to-day business, and that can end up mattering to the business as much as to the people they were built for. This one started as a way to solve a staffing problem in Uno Salud’s own clinics. It now supplies specialist care to regions that had little of it before.
Linzor Capital Partners has supported the program’s growth since investing in Uno Salud Dental in 2020, including a dedicated contribution made at the occasion of its 2025 Annual General Meeting. The program is led by Uno Salud’s clinical team, including Francisca Contreras, Chief Clinical Officer, and Francisco Moreno of the Clinical and Quality Management team.
Learn more about Linzor Capital Partners, Uno Salud Dental and other Out-of-the-Box Ideas across our portfolio in our 2025 Impact and Sustainability Report.