Dental neglect in children and adolescents is a form of child maltreatment and can be an indicator of other forms of maltreatment. Early identification of dental neglect is essential to initiate preventive interventions and connect families to appropriate health and social services to avoid further harm and to reduce negative impacts on child development and well-being. Articles that systematically synthesise and compare models for early detection, intersectoral cooperation and care for dental neglect have not been published yet. This scoping review aims to map the evidence on strategies for the identification and prevention of dental neglect in children and adolescents.

The study is designed as a scoping review. Based on the Population, Concept and Context (PCC) scheme, the databases PubMed, PsycInfo and Scopus are searched for publications before July 2023. Publications in all languages will be considered in case an abstract in English or German is available. The review will include articles reporting on strategies for identification and prevention related to dental neglect in children and adolescents as conducted in health service and community settings. Data from included articles will be extracted to describe and categorise the available evidence. The review will follow recommendations of the Joanna Briggs Institute Reviewer’s Manual on scoping reviews and the Critical Appraisal Tool for Health Promotion and Prevention Reviews (CAT HPPR).

Ethical approval is not required, as no personal data will be collected in this literature-based study. The study’s findings will be disseminated through conference presentations, scientific publications and stakeholder meetings.

Child maltreatment (CM) is a major public health issue with lifelong consequences on mental health, quality of life, educational and economic prospects of children who experienced CM. Early identification of maltreated children is important to prevent further CM and ensure that children’s basic needs are met, as well as to address and avoid further consequences. However, above and beyond early identification, it is crucial to avoid the occurrence of CM. This may include the reduction of risk factors at the family and community level as well as creating supportive environments for growing up safely. Therefore, we need to understand the prevention of CM conceptually and view it not only from a medical perspective, but also from a population health perspective. The aim of this scoping review is to identify and describe theories, models or frameworks on the prevention of CM from a broad population health perspective, considering primary, secondary and tertiary prevention strategies.

A broad search in four databases (PubMed (NIH NLM), PsycInfo (Ovid), CINAHL Plus (EBSCOhost) and Web of Science (Clarivate)) will be conducted from 2009 to current. Additionally, the grey literature on websites from key public health organisations will be considered. Results will be reported following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews: Checklist and Explanation (2018). The review will include articles describing a theory, model or framework on prevention strategies for CM. Studies focussing on single interventions that do not describe prevention strategies conceptually, will be excluded. General characteristics of the frameworks, theories and models and information on types of prevention strategies they describe will be extracted. Findings will be presented in a structured table format as well as narratively.

As we will not collect any personal, confidential or sensitive data, ethical approval is not required. We will publish our results in a scientific journal, present them at conferences and use them for further knowledge translation activities. The scoping review is registered with the Open Science framework: https://osf.io/49g7z/.