What do patients think about dental services in Quebec? Analysis of a dentist rating website.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Disparity exists between the public view of the "ideal" dentist and patient experiences of dental practice: dentists are expected to be altruistic and patient-centred, yet patient surveys suggest that the profession is overly motivated by profit. OBJECTIVE: To determine how the public views dental care in Quebec. METHODS: A random sample of comments about Quebec dentists made in 2011 was extracted from the public website RateMDs.com. Dentist characteristics and patient comments were analyzed using descriptive statistics and qualitative deductive and inductive thematic analysis. RESULTS: Eighty-six entries from a random sample of 47 of a possible 750 dentists were extracted and analyzed. Most dentists were men (66%) and worked in Montreal (51%). Patient comments were mainly positive (83%). Themes included overall impressions, communication and care, clinical competence, professionalism and office environment. Positive comments focused on patient-centred communication, in which the patient felt respected and involved in treatment planning; competence, seen as comprehensive, efficient and long-lasting treatment; and professionalism, which included ethical behaviour such as knowing professional limits. Negative comments focused on reticent communication styles that did not encourage patient input; incompetence, which included poor pain management and unnecessary treatment; and unprofessional conduct, such as lack of transparency in pricing. CONCLUSION: In contrast with the negative image of dentists reported from patient surveys, comments on one public website were primarily positive. Our findings reinforce the importance of patient-centred education and communication training for students and continuing education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".