Child Abuse Dental Report Form

Abstract

Child abuse is a worldwide anthroposocial phenomenon that threatens children’s physical, emotional and intellectual development, as well as their dignity, security, well-being and even their own lives. The approach to this problem is multidisciplinary, and all healthcare professionals must work together in preventing, detecting, and reporting suspected child abuse. Dentists are in a strategic position to recognize and report suspected cases. The aim of this work is to propose a form for Portuguese Dentists to fill in when collecting the medical history and performing the physical examination of a child suspected of abuse. For the development of this form, we used the Missing Person Dental Report and the Code Manual of the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Fédération Dentaire Internationale (FDI) Numbering System (FDI Two-Digits Notation, ISO 3950) in the codification of the injuries and the International Classification of Diseases to Dentistry and Stomatology from the World Health Organization (WHO). The instrument we developed – the Child Abuse Dental Report Form – includes 7 sections: Section 1 – Mandated Reporter; Section 2 – Victim’s Information; Section 3 – Involved Parties; Section 4 – Mouth; Section 5 – ICD-DA Codes; Section 6 – Dental Characteristics; and Section 7 – Other Dental Information.