Dental Students' Attitude Towards Patient Interaction Communication and Behavioral Skills in Tehran Azad University of Medical Sciences

The ability to communicate effectively with patients is one of the most important features of a clinician. Effective communication leads to the proper transfer of information from the sender (patient) to the recipient (clinician), enhances the recipient's knowledge and ability to perform tasks or influence his or her attitude and behavior. Therefore, considering the importance of communicating with the patient, which is certainly effective in treating the patient, in this study, we investigated the attitude of dental students about patient communication skills and its related factors at faculty of dentistry, Tehran Medical Sciences , Islamic Azad University in 2017.

In this descriptive study, a researcher-made questionnaire containing various indicators of communication skills was used in 10 items, and these were formulated in accordance with the four-point Likert scale of these indicators. Their validity and reliability was thus ensured and its reliability was tested by Test-Retest and it was equal to 0.85. Then, their attitudes about the skills of communication skills classified as absolutely agree (good/positive attitude), agree (moderate attitude), disagree & absolutely disagree (poor/negative attitude). Finally, the role of factors related to attitude was determined using chi-square test.

The study was conducted on 123 senior year students with an average age of 30 years. 33.3% were male and 66.7% were female. 39% were married and the rest were single. 48% of people did not participate in communication skills training courses. 52% of people had communication problems with their patients. The good attitude was 40.6%, the moderate attitude was 59.5% and there was no negative attitude. There was no significant relationship between age, gender, marital status, participation in training course and communication attitude (P <0/2).

Regarding to given results , although negative attitude does not exist, but there was not positive attitude related to communication skills at to ideal level. So, related educational courses was recommended.