ABSTRACT Background Social workers in interprofessional dental teams play a critical role in making oral healthcare more equitable and accessible, especially for individuals with special health care needs (SHCN). Social workers are specifically trained to identify the connections between oral health, mental and physical well‐being, socioeconomic status, history of trauma, and access to resources. Their work supports whole‐person care and helps mitigate social determinants of health (SDoH) that produce systemic barriers to access to proper dental care. This narrative review explores four core domains that synthesize and highlight previous seminal research on the intersectional contribution of social workers to interprofessional dental teams. Methods Through a narrative review, we identified articles that discussed social work's role in supporting adults with SHCN in dentistry across the following four core domains: (1) addressing SDoH barriers, (2) mental health support, (3) care coordination, and (4) community engagement within dental settings.
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