PATIENTS EXPECTATIONS OF AN IDEAL DENTIST AND THEIR VIEWS CONCERNING THE DENTIST THEY VISITED - DO THE VIEWS CONFORM TO THE EXPECTATIONS AND WHAT DETERMINES HOW WELL THEY CONFORM

A convenience sample of patients (n=271) from community health centres and private clinics in different parts of Finland were recruited for this study through their dental clinic. Equal numbers of regular and i rregular clients were invited to participate. Before the treatment pro cedure, each patient filled out a questionnaire with forty Likertian s tatements dealing with their expectations of an ideal dentist, and nin e about their own background, i.e., age, sex, regularity of dental vis its. basic and professional education, and occupation. After the treat ment subjects described their treating dentists' behaviour using simil ar statements. In the analyses two approaches were applied. First, fac tor analyses with orthogonal varimax rotation were conducted with the data about the ideal and actual dentist. For the ideal dentist, five f actors were extracted: 1) mutual communication, 2) fair support, 3) pe rsonal appearance, 4) preferred type of practice, and 5) blaming; and for the actual dentist 5 factors were extracted: 1) mutual communicati on, 2) pain control, 3) fair support, 4) personal appearance, and 5) p referred type of practice. The factor structures were found to be simi lar when they were compared with transformation analysis. This justifi ed the second analysis where the differences between the ideal and the actual factor scores were compared. The expectations of the patients were met on all the other dentist characteristics except mutual commun ication and fair support. There were not many differences between subg roups of patients. In further studies, other background variables, suc h as previous experiences of the patients, should be considered in ord er to obtain a more complete explanation of the variation in satisfact ion. More attention should be paid to the communication skills of the dentists.