Patients appear to favor their interactions with dental therapists over their visits with dentists, according to a new study in the British Dental Journal (March 2010, Vol. 208:5, pp. 212-213).
With the recent expansion in the number of dental therapists trained in the U.K., along with new legislation that permits therapists to take on a wider role in dental practice, patients' perceptions about quality of care provided by dental therapists has become an increasingly important issue.
This prompted researchers from the School of Dental Sciences at Liverpool University Dental Hospital to investigate whether there are differences in patient satisfaction after a visit to a dental therapist compared to a visit to a dentist.
They handed out questionnaires to 240 patients attending an appointment with a therapist and to 400 patients who were seeing a dentist, in eight different dental practices. The questionnaires used a 10-item scale of patient satisfaction, which provides an outcome measure of overall patient satisfaction and three subscale outcomes: information-communication, understanding-acceptance, and technical competence.
Of the 640 questionnaires handed out, 431 (67.3%) were returned. Patients attending therapists were found to have a significantly higher level of overall satisfaction (p < 0.001) and also in all three subscales (p < 0.001) than those attending appointments with dentists.
"Although a clear distinction in patient satisfaction according to the type of provider was found, the reasons behind this finding are unclear," the authors wrote. "Care needs to be taken in interpreting the results, with further work undertaken to explore this phenomenon more fully."
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