Oral Health and Dental Management

Ethics and governance in oral health settings: Exploring different models of dentist?patient interaction

2^nd International Conference and Exhibition on Dental & Oral Health

April 21-23, 2014 Crown Plaza Dubai, UAE

Virginia Bodolica and Martin Spraggon

Scientific Tracks Abstracts: Oral Health Dent Manag

Abstract:

Although the relationship between providers and receivers of health services is a critical component of the integrated approach to excellence in healthcare, it has been rarely examined in the stomatology sector. The agent-principal type of encounter between dentistry professionals and patients provide opportunities for the former to behave at the latter?s expense, requiring effective governance mechanisms for alleviating the emerging agency problems and ethical concerns. Relying on the agency framework of dentist-patient interactions, we provide the descriptive accounts of patients who had undergone oral health treatments in stomatological clinics located in Eastern Europe. A purposeful sampling procedure to select cases that were rich in information and displayed high levels of heterogeneity was adopted. The study illustrates the dominant agency problems, ethical challenges and governance characteristics in each of the three identified models of dentist-patient relationship, including the dentist-centered, patient-centered and dentist-patient partnership models. It was argued that explicit efforts ought to be deployed towards the establishment of partnership models of dentist?patientinteraction that might facilitate the achievement of optimal relational outcomes.

Biography :

Virginia Bodolica is an Associate Professor at the American University of Sharjah (UAE) and a Visiting Faculty at the ESE Business School, Universidad de los Andes (Chile). She received her Ph. D. from HEC Montreal (Canada) and she teaches and deliverscustomized executive programs in the areas of strategy, governance and human resources. Her research interests are related to corporate governance issues, knowledge management practices, and relational encounters in healthcare settings. The results of her research have been published in journals such as Health Expectations, Public Health, Strategic Organization, Journal of Business Ethics, Academy of Management Annals and Strategic Management Journal.