REDUCING VIOLENCE-RELATED ORAL HEALTH DISPARITIES

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed 24-month planning grant would lay the foundation for a full-scale multidisciplinary research aftercare program aimed at reducing violence-related oral health disparities. Violence-related orofacial injury constitutes an important, yet much neglected, source of oral health disparity. Despite emerging awareness that routine medical care for violence-related trauma--including orofacial injury--is virtually exclusively limited to treating physical injury, scant attention has been directed at addressing the psychosocial sequelae of orofacial injury. The overarching goal of the proposed planning grant is to lay the foundation for an interdisciplinary research program aimed at reducing violence-related oral health disparities by providing aftercare psychosocial services for persons in need. Broad objectives of the proposed planning grant are: (a) to build and solidify the infrastructure and collaborative linkages necessary to support a full-scale research program that would weave psychosocial aftercare into the fabric of orofacial injury care; (b) to gather requisite preparatory knowledge concerning medical center stakeholder views regarding aftercare services; (c) to ascertain the logistic feasibility of various models of aftercare provision; and (e) to gain information from potential aftercare patients concerning personal, structural or other barriers to receiving aftercare. The specific aims of the proposed planning grant are: (a) to conduct secondary data analyses to replicate potentially key findings across two precursor studies; (b) to conduct semi-structured individual interviews with various medical center service providers and stakeholders to identify existing patient resources, perceptions of patient needs as well as potential logistic, staffing or other barriers to implementation of screening protocols, and to identify other issues that might affect the feasibility of mounting a collaborative aftercare intervention; (c) to conduct semi-structured face-to-face interviews with a stratified sample of victims of intentional orofacial injury to assess need for services as determined by screening criteria, to determine self-assessed need for treatment as well as treatment preferences, and perceived barriers to care; and (d) to develop a one-day workshop based on preliminary findings to solidify collaborative relationships, disseminate findings, and receive input regarding aftercare models.