(1155) Pharmacists’ Contributions to Dental Medicine: A Systematic Literature Review

Objectives: The objective of this systematic literature review is to assess the scope and extent of pharmacists’ contributions in dental health clinics. Oral health disorders pose one of the most significant health challenges, affecting up to 3.6 billion people worldwide across all age groups. Pharmacists have been noted to contribute across a variety of disciplines, most notably providing oral health counseling in the community. However, pharmacist contribution to dental medicine in other areas is not well known. This systematic literature review attempts to identify other current pharmacy contributions that target prominent issues in dental health.

Methods: We conducted a full-text systematic literature review of available reports detailing pharmacy involvement in dental practice following Cochrane and PRISMA recommendations. We searched Cochrane, EBSCO, Embase, International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA), PubMed, and Scopus for published articles written in English from database inception to July 13th, 2023. We used an artificial intelligence-powered software tool, Rayyan, to deduplicate results and screen abstracts. The outcome of interest was to identify the types of existing pharmacy services in dental practice. We will perform qualitative data analysis to describe the outcome of interest following full-text review and data extraction.

Results: We identified 3,101 studies across Cochrane (n=115), EBSCO (n=655), Embase (n=724), IPA (n=190), PubMed (n=550), Scopus (n=867). After deduplication, we included 1,651 articles for abstract screening. Once abstract screening was performed by two blinded reviewers (an expert unblinded third reviewer provided feedback and resolved discrepancies), we identified ninety-six articles for full-text review.

Conclusions: Implications of Findings: Once completed, the study results will inform pharmacists of existing opportunities to contribute to dental practice.