Abstract

Introduction: Empathy between dental practitioners and dental patients increases communication between them, resulting in improvements in patient satisfaction and efficacy of oral health care. Proper communication and empathy between dental practitioners and patients are major concerns of professors, managers and education programmers. The aim of this study was to evaluate empathy levels among dentists participated the 9th Iranian General Dentists Association Congress in 2014.

Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 200 dentists completed the persian version of Jefferson Scale of Empathy-Health Care Provider Version (JSE-HP). Demographic and data obtained from the questionnaires was analyzed by SPSS v.20 using Chi-square (a = 0.05).

Results: Among 200 participant ,103 were male (51.5%) and 97 were female (48.5%) and 120 dentists had positive attitude to empathy (60%) and 80 dentists had negative attitude to empathy (40%), Statistical tests showed no significant differences between age, sex,  general dentists and specialists, graduates from domestic and foreign universities and time of graduation . (p value > 0.05).

Conclusion: The empathy scores of studied dentists were less than the acceptable levels. It is necessary to design proper educational programs to improve empathy of dentists with patients