Integrating Oral Health into Prenatal Care: A Scoping Review

Objectives: To systematically identify the conceptual models for integrating oral health into prenatal care and describe the existing guidelines, policies and programs for the integration.
Methods: This scoping review was conducted using the framework proposed by the Joanna Briggs Institute which has six stages, using specific search terms on the following databases Ovid Medline, Web of Science, EMBASE, EBSCO, CINAHL, Psychinfo, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Proquest and the Google scholar. Articles published in English and focused on conceptual models, guidelines, policies and programs for integrating oral health into prenatal care were included. Content analysis of the articles was performed to synthesize the results.
Results: A total of 2861 references were found from the databases, and 30 met the inclusion criteria for the review. Six articles were about guidelines, 2 about policies, 8 on programs, and 14 were about primary researches. The guidelines outline recommended standards for oral healthcare by dental and non-dental professionals during pregnancy. The policies aimed at promoting interprofessional collaboration while emphasizing the role of non-dental providers to routinely provide oral health education and screening during prenatal care. The programs focused on the provision of oral health education or screening services to pregnant women by dental and non-dental professionals, but included little impact evaluation. There was only one article citing a conceptual model for the integration of oral health in prenatal care used for a program among adolescents.
Conclusions: There is a lack of conceptual models for integration of oral health in prenatal care. There is some evidence of the value of guidelines, policies and programs on integrating oral heath into prenatal care, and very little information on their impact. A new, or refined, conceptual model to guide the integration of oral health into prenatal care is suggested.