Customer service in dental offices: analyses of service orientations and waiting time in telephone interactions with a potential new customer.

Increasing competition among health care organizations has prompted greater concern for the quality of "customer service" in brief encounters with patients. This study examined service practices engaged by dental office staff interacting over the telephone with a potential new customer. The goals of the study were to determine whether the staff displayed customer-oriented and control-oriented service communication behaviors and to examine the relation between these service behaviors and waiting time required of customers. Structured observational data were collected in phone encounters with staff in 84 dental offices. Approximately 40% of the staff engaged in the customer-oriented behavior of inviting the customer to share questions or concerns, and 31% exhibited the control-oriented behavior of reciting promotional pitches on behalf of the dental office. Six other communication behaviors were observed with less frequency. Staff who made customers wait on the line longer were more likely to use promotional pitches. Analyses revealed no significant relation between waiting time and other service communication behaviors.

Health Education and the primary care physician: the practitioner's perspective.

Considering the attention given to health education and promotion, it is surprising that little research assesses the opinions and behavioral inclinations of physicians. Survey data collected in Florida address this issue. Responses of primary care private practitioners reveal that whereas MDs endorse health promotion and acknowledge a link between positive lifestyle and health, their outlook regarding the potential of community-based health education remains skeptical. A majority blame ineffective health education on public apathy. Nonetheless, a sizeable minority are willing to either begin or increase their involvement in health education programs. Multivariate analyses suggest that active or receptive MDs view the public's lifestyle knowledge as inadequate and select the MD as the health professional most suited to assume primary responsibility for health education. Clues for identifying practitioners who might engage in further health education are provided by examining age, specialty, patient load and community size. For example, GPs/FPs might more readily endorse an educational program if it allows for one-to-one physician-patient interaction; emphasizing this instructional mode appears less important in securing the cooperation of their more specialized primary care counterparts. Further, MDs with the larger caseloads are more likely to view health education as the physician's responsibility.

The need for cooperative health education: some survey findings.

PIP: This paper briefly reviews the literature on health education, presents findings from 2 surveys conducted by the authors in northwest Florida in 1978, and discusses implications of the data. The 2 surveys were a population-based multistage area probability sample of households which attempted to determine the current status of health knowledge, attitudes and practice of the study population, and a mail survey of the area's primary care physicians which sought to assess the extent and type of health education provided by physicians. Usable data was collected from 321 households (53.5%) and 103 physicians (45%). 49% of physicians believed that the average patient has an adequate level of knowledge about healthy lifestyles, but the health knowledge of the 321 household respondents as measured by identification of factors reducing risks for heart attack and recognition of early warning signs of cancer was found to be uneven. 57% of physicians believed that patients were not interested in expanding their knowledge of health, but a majority of respondents reported having been influenced to change their health habits. Discrepancy was found between the amount of time physicians report spending on health education and the amount of such education household respondents claim to receive. 80% of physicians felt that their patients had comparatively low regard for their health, whereas 69% of respondents from households placed health 1st, 2nd or 3rd in a field of 9 life values. The correspondence between health care knowledge and practice was found to be poor in many instances, as measured by the proportion of respondents who smoked, were overweight, failed to exercise or use seat belts, among other areas.^ieng

Memory for noun pairs in the same or different underlying strings.

A number of studies have shown that children learn noun pairs faster when they have been presented in a noun-verb-noun context than when they are presented in a noun-conjunction-noun context. Suzuki and Rohwer (1969) hypothesized that the underlying strings of sentences correspond to memory units, making it easier to recall two nouns from the same underlying string than from two different underlying strings. They reported that data from fifth graders supported this hypothesis but that data from college students did not. The experiments reported here were done to determine whether the hypothesis would be supported (a) if the test rate were faster than that used by Suzuki and Rohwer or (b) if sentences longer and more complex than those used by them were employed. The recall data accorded with some predictions derived from the hypothesis. However, data from Ss' posttraining reports on how they learned the pairs suggest that Ss, particularly adults, often made up their own strings rather than using those provided, and raise the question of the adequacy of Suzuki and Rohwer's procedure for testing this hypothesis, particularly in adults.