IDENTIFYING CHILD PHYSICAL ABUSE: AN OVERLOOKED ISSUE IN DENTISTRY

Abstract

Objectives: To determine the dental practitioner’s knowledge, attitude, and behavior towards child physical abuse in dental teaching hospitals of Peshawar.
Methods and materials: An analytical cross-sectional study was executed in the two dental teaching hospitals of Peshawar using convenience sampling. The data was gathered by self-administered, structured questionnaire completed by 127 house offi cer, 147 trainees and 32 faculty members. Chi-square test was used to analyze association between categorical variables.
Results: Out of 320 questionnaires, 306 were returned with complete evaluation yielding a response rate of 95.6%. In the present study, 69.6% of the respondents displayed suffi cient knowledge while 11.1% had poor knowledge on the topic of child physical abuse. Almost 83% of dental practitioners had positive attitude towards the importance of detecting and reporting cases of child physical abuse to legal authorities and 60.5% of dentists strongly agreed that training on child physical abuse should be provided in workplace. Only 11.1% of the respondents had suspected a cases of child physical abuse in their past professional life and only 3.2% of them had reported their suspicion to legal authorities.
Conclusion: Dental practitioners have inadequate knowledge about the circumstances in which they should report suspected cases of physical abuse to legal authorities as well as to which legal authorities such cases should be reported. Majority of dentists stated that there is lack of training regarding this topic and showed positive attitude towards dental practitioners’ role in documenting, identifying, and reporting cases of child physical abuse.