Patients’ assessment of the professional and business aspects of dental practice

Abstract

Dentistry may be described as a profession which depends for its continued existence on loyal patients regularly attending the dental clinics. This existence depends on the impression of work and working environment that patients have about dentist. Many dental practitioners would wish to avoid recognizing the fact that dentistry is a business like any other. This study was designed to look for the factors that patients or if you will, customers used to judge the standard of dental practice, and how these factors affect the balance between professionalism and business in general dental practice. The study was conducted in Al- Ahsa area, Eastern region of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It was done in two phases: the first phase was the generation of criteria which defined a good dental practice in the eyes of the general dental practitioner. In this phase, 40 general dental practitioners were interviewed. The second phase dealt with the evaluation of these criteria by a sample of 378 patients (215 males and 163 females) who were asked to evaluate 16 criteria created in the first phase by dentists. The study revealed that males were significantly more interested in dental practice with a good image than females. The study has also showed that the highly educated patients preferred to be treated by a dentist who gave them postoperative and oral hygiene instructions. Dentist skill was considered more important by young patients (24.1 years ± 9.03) than the older patients (30.5 years ± 2.7 years). No significant difference was found among patients about the studied variables based on the patient’s ethnic background.