Review articleAccess to dental services for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities – A scoping review
Section snippets
What this paper adds?
This paper, to our knowledge, is a first review of published empirical research data on access to dental services for children with IDD in the last 17 years. Authors of international studies from 11 countries (US, Australia, The Netherlands, Canada, France, Poland, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, India) identified physical inaccessibility, lack of access to information, insufficient insurance cover among carers, and dental practitioner lack of knowledge of disability issues, and little
Research design
Guided by Arksey and O'Malley (2005), the stages of the scoping review were: (1) identifying the research question; (2) searching for relevant studies; (3) selecting studies based on pre-defined inclusion criteria; (4) extracting data; and (5) collating, summarising, and reporting the results.
Results
A total of 600 articles were identified through database searching, with 420 remaining after deletion of duplicates. Two reviewers (RUC, NH) independently screened the title and abstract of all 420 articles against the inclusion and exclusion criteria, resulting in 354 being excluded and 66 full text articles accessed for further assessment. Sixteen articles met the inclusion criteria. Disagreements between reviewers were resolved following discussions, and regular consultation was sought from
Discussion
The findings indicate that, internationally, there has been limited exploration of access to dental services for children with IDD. Of particular note was that most research was focussed on the perceptions and attitudes of carers towards dental services, with only one study addressing the perceptions of dental practitioners (de Jongh et al., 2008). More so, only one study was of an intervention (Meurs et al., 2010). Although many access barriers were identified in this review, notably absent
Conclusion
Since the research in the area of access to dental services for children with IDD is notably limited, more investigations are required to understand the influence of the six dimensions of access on the oral health of children with IDD. Addressing the service-user and service-provider perceived social and environmental factors is imperative for provision of effective and equitable services for children with IDD.
Conflicts of interest
None
Acknowledgment
First author is supported by Australian Government Training Scholarship. Authors would like to thank Ms. Ange Johns-Hayden, Senior Research Advisor, La Trobe University for her expert advice on the literature search process.
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