El paciente difícil en odontología elaboración de un modelo de atributos personales para identificarlo / The difficult patient in dentistry: developing a model of personal characteristics to identificate him

RESUMO

The comunication between the dentist and the patient, or what we have called dentist-patient relationship constitute itself a clue to solve primary problems derived of the profesional practice. In this relationship with patients, the dentist may face what we have called dificult patient. This dificult patient have several behavioral characteristics wich can alter the dentist emotional equilibrium, the capacity of making proper diagnosis and finaly a siccesful tratment may not be obtain as an end result. The dificul patient behavior may be explained by a variety of factors such as the type of pathology, the office enviroment, the comunity and/ or institution to with the patient belongs, the dentist emotional circunstance and at last the patient life style. In this work, we interview 50 profesional from the metropolitan area with an average of 18 years in practice, each dentist explained situations in wich the patient behavior could be typified as dificult. A number of 202 dificult patient cases were obtained and they were classified into 14 categories. 5 categories presented a higher frequency a)Schedule and/or appoinment timming. 2)Patients not following instructions and/or altering tratment. c)Anxious patients. d)Patients unhappy with their tratment. e)Authoritarian patients or patients without good manners. This 5 categories were present in the 60% of the situations and can be taken as a model with specific behavior al caracteristics as to identify the dificult patient. This is valuable in valuable in order to manage this type of patients and to be succesful