Discrimination and Dignity Experiences in Prior Oral Care Visits Predict Racialized Oral Health Inequities Among Nationally Representative US Adults.

Racism, an oppressive and fallacious sociopolitical hierarchy, is a fundamental cause of oral health inequities worldwide. Everyday discrimination is associated with worse self-rated oral health, toothache and adult tooth loss, and lower oral care utilization. Few studies examine discrimination or microaggressions within oral care settings or their effects on oral health outcomes.

Diana Scully: A Feminist Mentor and Torch Bearer.

In this piece, two former students and colleagues of Diana Scully reflect on her influence on their academic, professional, and personal lives. The authors provide a general overview of Scully's contributions to gender equity in terms of scholarship and curricular development, as well as her commitment to mentoring students and junior colleagues. They share their individual journeys developing expertise and working in the field of violence against women, as well as their collaborations as teachers, researchers, advocates, and service providers that were influenced, guided, and promoted by Scully.

Heightened vigilance and perceived discrimination in dental trainees' readiness for clinical practice.

Purpose/objective: The aims of this study were to examine associations between heightened vigilance and perceived discrimination on readiness for clinical practice and to examine the mediating effects of social support and resilience.

Methods: A survey was distributed to dental trainees (dental and dental hygiene students) enrolled at a US dental school located in the mid-Atlantic region. The survey assessed readiness for clinical practice and included measures of perceived discrimination, heightened vigilance, and the following wellness measures: perceived stress, resilience, anxiety, social support, and coping.

Calibrating a Transformer-Based Model's Confidence on Community-Engaged Research Studies: Decision Support Evaluation Study.

Background: Deep learning offers great benefits in classification tasks such as medical imaging diagnostics or stock trading, especially when compared with human-level performances, and can be a viable option for classifying distinct levels within community-engaged research (CEnR). CEnR is a collaborative approach between academics and community partners with the aim of conducting research that is relevant to community needs while incorporating diverse forms of expertise. In the field of deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI), training multiple models to obtain the highest validation accuracy is common practice; however, it can overfit toward that specific data set and not generalize well to a real-world population, which creates issues of bias and potentially dangerous algorithmic decisions.

"Like pouring salt in a wound": A qualitative exploration of the consequences of unmet housing needs for cancer patients and survivors in New York City.

Objective: To identify consequences of unmet housing needs in the period following cancer diagnosis.

Design: Qualitative descriptive design.

Participants: New York City-based cancer patients and survivors ( = 21) who reported experience of unmet housing needs while receiving cancer treatment.

Refining the process: Safety net dental professionals' experiences with teledentistry implementation during the first year of COVID-19.

Objectives: Teledentistry helped dentistry adapt to pandemic-era challenges; little is known about dental professionals' teledentistry experiences during this time. This analysis sought to understand professionals' pandemic teledentistry experiences and expectations for the modality's future.

Methods: We conducted virtual individual interviews (n = 21) via Zoom to understand how federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) delivered oral care during the first year of the pandemic, including but not limited to the use of teledentistry.

Attention-Based Models for Classifying Small Data Sets Using Community-Engaged Research Protocols: Classification System Development and Validation Pilot Study.

Background: Community-engaged research (CEnR) is a research approach in which scholars partner with community organizations or individuals with whom they share an interest in the study topic, typically with the goal of supporting that community's well-being. CEnR is well-established in numerous disciplines including the clinical and social sciences. However, universities experience challenges reporting comprehensive CEnR metrics, limiting the development of appropriate CEnR infrastructure and the advancement of relationships with communities, funders, and stakeholders.

From describing disparities to understanding why disparities exist: Anti-racist methods to support dental public health research.

Racism is understudied in the oral health literature at the same time that race is overutilized as an explanatory factor in study design. Social and behavioral methodologies offer conceptual models that can be used to include racism in dental public health questions. In addition, interdisciplinary and mixed methods approaches allow for understanding racism as an underlying cause of social and health disparities and exploring solutions that address historical, institutional, social, political, and economic drivers of oral health inequity, while recognizing the limits of measuring racism quantitatively.

Oral Health Equity Must Address Oppression: On the BSSOH Consensus Statement.

The Consensus Statement on Future Directions for the Behavioral and Social Sciences in Oral Health (Consensus Statement) is a transformational contribution to oral health research synthesizing a wide array of conceptual, methodological, and disciplinary concerns and offering strategies to improve scientific inquiry. The Consensus Statement explicates global oral health equity as a foundational concern of our field. Given this context, a key concern is missing from the statement: oppression!

Oral Health, Health Service Utilization, and Age at Arrival to the U.S. among Safety Net Patients.

Background: Immigrants' oral health disparities have not been adequately investigated using a lifecourse approach, which investigates the cumulative effects of risk and protective exposures among other considerations.

Methods: We examined self-reported oral health outcomes and health care appointment outcomes among a sample of patients enrolled at a federally qualified health center in Richmond Virginia (N = 327) who were categorized into three groups by approximate age at arrival to the U.S.

Developing a classification system and algorithm to track community-engaged research using IRB protocols at a large research university.

Community-engaged research (CEnR) is now an established research approach. The current research seeks to pilot the systematic and automated identification and categorization of CEnR to facilitate longitudinal tracking using administrative data. We inductively analyzed and manually coded a sample of Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocols.

Significance-Quest Theory.

Even though the motivation to feel worthy, to be respected, and to matter to others has been identified for centuries by scholars, the antecedents, consequences, and conditions of its activation have not been systematically analyzed or integrated. The purpose of this article is to offer such an integration. We feature a motivational construct, the quest for significance, defined as the need to have social worth.

Oral Health Knowledge, Barriers to Dental Care, and Awareness of a Medicaid Pregnancy Dental Coverage Among Reproductive-Age Women.

Oral health is an integral part of women's health, yet many women face barriers and go without necessary dental care. The objectives of this study were to (1) examine and compare pregnancy-related oral health knowledge and barriers to dental care access during pregnancy among women with private and public insurance and (2) estimate awareness of available Medicaid pregnancy dental benefit among Medicaid-enrolled women and explore associated factors. A cross-sectional survey was administered to a convenience sample of 21- to 45-year-old women ( = 187) visiting a large urban academic health center in Virginia.

Ideological Extremism Among Syrian Refugees Is Negatively Related to Intentions to Migrate to the West.

The conflict in Syria created a dire humanitarian situation, as nations around the world struggled with how best to deal with the more than 6.6 million Syrian refugees who fled their homes to escape aggression. Resistance to granting refugee status to individuals often originates in the belief that the influx of refugees endangers national security because of the presumably extremist religious and political beliefs that refugees hold.

A scoping review of the roles, training, and impact of community health workers in oral health.

Objective: To synthesize English or Spanish-language literature on community health workers' (CHWs') roles, training, and impact in oral health.

Basic Research Design: A scoping review conducted in accordance with the Arksey and O'Malley (2005) methodological framework.

Method: Electronic literature searches were conducted in Medline (Ovid), Embase (Ovid), DOSS, CINAHL, Web of Science, and Global Health CAB from inception of the databases to April 2020.

Advancing health equity through a theoretically critical implementation science.

While implementation science is driven by theory, most implementation science theories, models, and frameworks (TMF) do not address issues of power, inequality, and reflexivity that are pivotal to achieving health equity. Theories used in anthropology address these issues effectively and could complement prevailing implementation science theories and constructs. We propose three broad areas of theory that complement and extend existing TMF in implementation science to advance health equity.

Survival of silver diamine fluoride among patients treated in community dental clinics: a naturalistic study.

Background: Silver diamine fluoride (SDF) is a minimally-invasive preventive service used in the U.S. to avert and arrest caries since 2014.

MORE Care: an evaluation of an interprofessional oral health quality improvement initiative.

Objective: This evaluation assesses the Medical Oral Expanded Care (MORE Care) initiative in four states that focused on oral health integration into primary care practices located in dental shortage areas.

Methods: This analysis is conducted using self-reported primary data collected from each of the participating MORE Care clinics in South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Oregon. Three measures: the percentage of pediatric patients with a) fluoride varnish applied, b) self-management goals reviewed, and c) risk assessed, were evaluated to compare the impact and timing of change tactics on participating teams.

Perceived dental care need and actual oral health status in the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL).

Objectives: To evaluate the performance of subjective self-assessment of dental care need with objective oral disease status in a sample of Hispanics/Latinos.

Methods: Data from 13,561 participants of the 2008-2011 Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos were analyzed using complex survey procedure in SAS 9.4.

Identifying patients' priorities for quality survivorship: conceptualizing a patient-centered approach to survivorship care.

Purpose: This study explored cancer survivors' experiences with and priorities for cancer survivorship care to describe a patient-centered approach to quality survivorship care.

Methods: We conducted 22 focus groups with 170 adult survivors of breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer from six cities across the country and online. We used thematic analysis to identify participants' principles and priorities for quality survivorship care.

Prevalence and Patterns of Dental Care Utilization among US-Born and Non-US Born Hispanics in the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos.

Objectives: Access to routine dental services is important to maintaining good oral health. The aims of this study were to describe the dental care utilization patterns of a diverse group of Hispanic/Latino men and women and assess differences in dental care utilization by perceived need for dental care and proxy measures of acculturation.

Methods: Data from 13,792 participants of the Hispanic Community Health Study were analyzed with SAS 9.

Social context moderates the effects of quest for significance on violent extremism.

Quest for significance theory (Kruglanski et al., 2013; Kruglanski, Jasko, Chernikova, Dugas, & Webber 2017) states that extreme behavior for an ideological cause is more likely under psychological conditions that induce a search for significance and social recognition. Two forms of motivation for significance have been identified; the quest for individual significance rooted in personal experiences and the quest for collective significance rooted in the perception that one's social group is humiliated and/or disrespected.

Confronting the opioid epidemic: public opinion toward the expansion of treatment services in Virginia.

Background: Public opinion polls have consistently shown Americans prefer treatment over arrest policies for opioid users. As the opioid epidemic remains a major health problem in the United States, it is important to determine the type of treatment policies the public would support. Theoretically, government should take into consideration the opinion of its constituents when deciding how to act.

Which features of psychopathy and impulsivity matter most for prison violence? New evidence among female prisoners.

Prison violence is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. While a great deal of research has been conducted in male samples, very few studies are dedicated to understanding violence committed by female offenders. Two constructs that have emerged as important predictors of violence are psychopathy and impulsivity.

Perspectives from oncology patient navigation programs on information management practices and needs: a descriptive study.

Purpose: The purposes of this study are to describe oncology patient navigation (PN) program perspectives on: (1) use of information systems and processes, (2) uses of program data, and (3) desired information system characteristics.

Methods: We conducted multi-phase data collection to inform development of the Patient Navigation Barriers and Outcomes Tool™ (PN-BOT™), a new information management and reporting tool for oncology PN programs. Phase I was a national online survey of PN staff (n = 343) about data practices.