Domestic Violence against Women Detected and Managed in Dental Practice: a Systematic Review

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the knowledge of dental care professionals to identify and manage clinical situations that indicate violence against women. PRISMA guidelines were followed and a systematic review protocol was registered in PROSPERO. The systematic search was designed based on the PICo strategy. Six databases were used as primary research sources (PubMed, Scopus, LILACS, SciELO, Web of Science, and Embase). Three databases (OpenGrey, OpenThesis, and OATD) were used to detect the “grey literature”. Observational studies (cross-sectional, cohort, or case-control) were included, and there were no restrictions of year or language of publication. Two authors selected and extracted the data from the eligible studies. The risk of bias was assessed with the JBI Critical Appraisal Checklist. The search resulted in 10,115 studies. Eleven met the eligibility criteria and were included in the qualitative synthesis. The studies were published from 1994 to 2018. All studies presented low risk of bias. Among the dental care professionals, only 1-7.1% of the dentists included injury search and examination of their patients for signs of violence. Less than 47% of the professionals had knowledge to identify violence injuries. When it comes to knowledge to identify signs of domestic violence, positive answers were below 24%. Considering all the variables assessed in this study, dental care professionals presented deficiencies regarding the knowledge and management of situations of domestic violence against women. Educational strategies are necessary to prepare dental care professional to identify and report suspicious cases.

Factors influencing the perception of feeling safe in pre‐hospital emergency care: A mixed‐methods systematic review

“…This approach does not attempt to re‐interpret data, to find new meaning in data or generate theory (Adams et al, 2021). Furthermore, regarding the methodological evaluation of the articles using the JBI Critical Appraisal Checklist, the reviewers found it difficult to interpret and evaluate some items, a problem that also arose in other reviews (Adams et al, 2021; Parsons et al, 2022; Santos Nascimento et al, 2022). However, the problem was solved by means of discussion and the evaluation of a third reviewer, guaranteeing that there was no risk of bias to invalidate the results of the studies.…”

“…However, the problem was solved by means of discussion and the evaluation of a third reviewer, guaranteeing that there was no risk of bias to invalidate the results of the studies. In this sense, it is worth mentioning that the decision regarding the risk of bias of the studies was taken beforehand, following the examples of other researchers (Adams et al, 2021; Santos Nascimento et al, 2022).…”

“…In this sense, it is worth mentioning that the decision regarding the risk of bias of the studies was taken beforehand, following the examples of other researchers (Adams et al, 2021;Santos Nascimento et al, 2022).…”

“…All studies were ranked as providing weak, adequate, moderate or strong evidence. Taking other systematic reviews as an example, the reviewers agreed a priori that studies would be assessed as weak (high risk of bias) if up to 49% of the critical appraisal items received positive (yes) scores, adequate (medium risk of bias) if 50%–69% received positive scores, moderate (low risk of bias) if 70%–85% received positive scores and strong (low risk of bias) if 86%–100% received positive scores (Adams et al, 2021; Santos Nascimento et al, 2022). The decision was made to exclude studies containing weak evidence due to the possible high risk of bias.…”

Bearing the marks: understanding how domestic violence affects oral health

“…In addition, 86.9% were unaware of the referral numbers for reporting suspected domestic abuse instances [11] . Less than 47% of these specialists were found to have the expertise required to recognize injuries brought on by violence [12] . These findings show that dental practitioners have a major knowledge and awareness gap when it comes to diagnosing and treating DV cases.…”