Emergency Dental For Kids In Louisville, CO

Call 911 or go to a pediatric emergency room now if your child has trouble breathing or swallowing, swelling spreading under the jaw or into the neck, a head injury with loss of consciousness or vomiting, or bleeding that will not stop after 10 minutes of firm pressure.

Children's Hospital Colorado, North Campus. 469 State Highway 7, Broomfield. Pediatric emergency care, 24 hours a day. 720-478-5000.

Everything below is for the other kind of night.

Mini Miners is a pediatric dental office in Erie, about 10 miles from downtown Louisville. We are not in Louisville and we will not pretend to be. We are the office a lot of Louisville families drive to, and the office that picks up after 5 p.m. for the children we already see.

Is This a 911, an ER, or a Dentist?

Call us tonight

A knocked-out permanent tooth. Minutes matter. Steps below.
A tooth loose, pushed out of place, or driven up into the gum
A broken tooth with pink or red showing in the break
Pain your child cannot sleep through
Swelling that appeared today

Call us in the morning

A small chip, no pain, nothing pink or red in the break
A knocked-out baby tooth, once bleeding has stopped, no swelling, no fever
A tooth that turned grey days after a bump
A lost filling or crown with no pain

Still not sure

ParentSmart Healthline, 720-777-0123. Children's Hospital Colorado runs it. A registered pediatric nurse, any hour, any day. We can tell you whether a tooth needs a dentist. A nurse can tell you whether your child needs a hospital.

Knocked-Out Tooth: Baby or Adult? Answer This First.

Nearly every page you found tonight says the same thing. Pick it up, keep it in milk, get to a dentist.

That is the adult tooth protocol. On a baby tooth it is wrong.

Baby tooth: do not put it back

The 2020 International Association of Dental Traumatology guidelines are one sentence on this: an avulsed primary tooth should not be replanted.

Three reasons, in the guideline's own order. The treatment burden on a small child is heavy. Replanting can damage the permanent tooth forming above it or disturb how it erupts. And the one that outranks both, in their words, is to avoid a medical emergency from aspiration of the tooth.

That last part is what nobody publishes. The risk is not only the adult tooth. It is a loose object in a crying child's mouth.

Do this instead:

Fold clean gauze over the socket. Have your child bite down. 10 minutes. Stop lifting it to look.
Find the tooth. Not to save it, to account for it.
If you cannot find it, that is an emergency room visit, not a dental visit. The guideline is direct: an avulsed primary tooth can be embedded in the lip, cheek or tongue, pushed into the nose, swallowed or inhaled, and a child whose tooth is not found should be evaluated at an emergency room, especially with any coughing or wheezing.
Cold compress on the lip or cheek. 10 minutes on, 10 off.
Photograph the mouth. It helps us more than you would think.
Call us. Mention it if the injury was dirty. The guideline flags a possible tetanus booster when the wound was contaminated.

Front baby teeth are usually in place until somewhere around age 6 to 8. If you cannot tell which kind of tooth you are holding, do not put it back. Store it, photograph it, call.

Adult tooth: put it back at the scene, right now

Hold it by the crown, the white part. Do not touch the root.
If it is dirty, rinse it gently in milk, saline, or your child's own saliva. Not under the tap. The 2020 guideline replaced the running-water instruction, and most pages you will find tonight still carry the old one.
Put it back in the socket. Have your child bite on a handkerchief to hold it.
If it will not go back in, milk. The order of preference is milk, a tooth-preservation solution, saliva spat into a container, then saline. With none of those, water is a poor medium but it beats letting the tooth dry out.
Move. Call us on the way.

The clock, in the numbers nobody prints

Replanted at the scene within about 15 minutes: the ligament cells are considered viable. This is what you are driving toward.
30 minutes of dry time: most of those cells are gone.
Over 60 minutes of total dry time: likely gone regardless of what the tooth was stored in afterward.

Both thresholds are dry time, not time since the accident. A tooth in milk at minute 3 and seen at minute 50 is not the same tooth as one that sat on a sidewalk for 50 minutes.

The 2020 Change Your Search Results Missed

If your child drove a front baby tooth up into the gum, you will read that it has to come out to protect the adult tooth underneath. That advice was retired 6 years ago.

The 2020 IADT guideline states that immediate extraction of an intruded primary tooth is no longer advised, and that the tooth should be allowed to reposition itself regardless of which direction the root was pushed. That usually happens within 6 months, and sometimes takes up to a year.

So the answer to "does it have to come out" is usually no. It is watch, and check on a schedule. For an avulsed baby tooth that means an exam at 6 to 8 weeks, then again around age 6 to see how the permanent tooth is coming in.

Two things to watch at home between visits. A tooth turning dark grey alongside any sign of infection. And swelling of the gum, because children often have an infection without complaining of pain.

The ER Will Not Fix the Tooth. That Is the Design, Not a Failure.

An emergency room images the jaw, rules out a head injury, controls bleeding, manages pain, and treats a spreading infection. It is usually not staffed to do the dental procedure that ends the problem. You get stabilized, then you still need a dentist.

Children's Hospital Colorado defines a dental emergency more narrowly than most parents expect: only toothaches with swelling and/or bleeding, and physical trauma to the teeth or face. Their words for everything else, including a minor toothache or a lost filling, are that it is not an emergency. Their dental clinic takes walk-in urgent cases Monday through Friday at various times, 720-777-6788. On a Saturday night the hospital door is the emergency room, not the dental clinic.

This path is getting busier. Nontraumatic dental cases in the Children's Hospital Colorado emergency room rose 175% between 2010 and 2025, according to hospital spokesperson Sarah Bonar, reported by KFF Health News in March 2026. Nationally, emergency visits for non-traumatic dental problems among children 14 and under climbed from 27.3 to 43.1 per 10,000 people between 2019 and 2022, per CareQuest Institute's November 2025 analysis, and nearly 75% of those children were on Medicaid dental coverage.

Read what those numbers describe. Not playground accidents. Cavities and infections that waited.

An urgent care on South Boulder Road can handle a fever or a cut lip. It cannot replant a tooth. Different building.

Insurance, and What Your Plan Does Tonight

We accept all major private dental insurance. Families without insurance can use the Mini Miners Membership Plan. Billing is quoted before we start.

If your child is on CHP+ or Health First Colorado, we are not your office, and you should still know this:

CHP+ has no yearly or lifetime dollar limits on covered dental services, effective July 1, 2026. That is Colorado HCPF's own wording.
The dental cap that started July 1, 2026 applies to adult services. Per the Colorado Dental Association, children on Medicaid have no dental benefit cap. Cover All Coloradans is a separate program and does carry an annual cap, so check which one your child is on.
Emergency care is not supposed to wait on a prior authorization. Colorado rule 10 CCR 2505-10-8.202: emergency services do not require prior authorization and are subject to prepayment review, and when a child is in acute pain the dentist should relieve the pain and complete the emergency treatment.

Why Louisville Families Drive to Erie

61 Erie Pkwy, Unit 101, in Erie Commons at the corner of Briggs St and Erie Pkwy, between I-25 and 287. Parking is at the door, which matters when you are carrying a crying child.

Mild, moderate and deep sedation, nitrous oxide in every room. X-rays taken in the chair on a camera-style machine, so your child keeps watching the movie. Small instruments and small sensors, which on an injured mouth is the difference between an exam and a fight. A soft tissue laser for the lip and tongue injuries that arrive with the same fall.

We have deep experience with children who have special needs, and Dr. Alison Grover has personal experience with it. A child who cannot be treated in a standard chair still gets treated.

More on the practice: pediatric dentist in Louisville, CO.

About Dr. Alison Grover, DDS

Dr. Grover owns Mini Miners. She completed her pediatric dental residency at UCLA and is a Pediatric Dental Diplomate, meaning board certified in pediatric dentistry. Her undergraduate degree is in child psychology, from Wellesley College.

Mini Miners sees children from age 1, or 6 months after the first tooth comes in, whichever is earlier.

Questions Parents Ask at 9 p.m.

My child knocked out a baby tooth. Do I put it back?

No. The 2020 IADT guideline says an avulsed primary tooth should not be replanted. The top reason is aspiration risk, then possible damage to the adult tooth above it. Gauze, 10 minutes of pressure, find the tooth, and if you cannot find it, go to an emergency room.

How long do I have to save a knocked-out adult tooth?

Replant it at the scene within about 15 minutes if you can. After 30 minutes of dry time most of the ligament cells are gone. After 60 minutes they are likely gone regardless of storage. Milk buys time. It does not stop the clock.

We are not patients. Will you see us tonight?

Call and ask. The after-hours line is built for patients of record and we will not promise a chair we cannot guarantee. What we will do is tell you where to go instead, usually Children's Hospital Colorado North Campus in Broomfield, or ParentSmart Healthline at 720-777-0123 if you are unsure. Then call us at 8 a.m.

My child's tooth turned grey a week after a fall. Is that an emergency?

Not usually at night, but it needs an exam that week. It becomes urgent with gum swelling, a bump on the gum above the tooth, fever, or a child who will not eat. Infection in children is often painless.

My child will not open their mouth. What then?

Three levels of sedation, nitrous oxide in every treatment room. For a child in pain, or a child with sensory or special needs, we start with the least we can use. Nobody gets held down.