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 irregular clients were invited to participate. Before the treatment procedure, each patient filled out a questionnaire with forty Likertian statements dealing with their expectations of an ideal dentist, and nine about their own background, i.e., age, sex, regularity of dental visits. basic and professional education, and occupation. After the treatment subjects described their treating dentists' behaviour using similar statements. In the analyses two approaches were applied. First, factor analyses with orthogonal varimax rotation were conducted with the data about the ideal and actual dentist. For the ideal dentist, five factors were extracted: 1) mutual communication, 2) fair support, 3) personal appearance, 4) preferred type of practice, and 5) blaming; and for the actual dentist 5 factors were extracted: 1) mutual communication, 2) pain control, 3) fair support, 4) personal appearance, and 5) preferred type of practice. The factor structures were found to be similar when they were compared with transformation analysis. This justified 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 communication and fair support. There were not many differences between subgroups of patients. In further studies, other background variables, such as previous experiences of the patients, should be considered in order to obtain a more complete explanation of the variation in satisfaction. More attention should be paid to the communication skills of the dentists.