Determinants of the quality of restorative dental care

This article reports the results of an analysis to determine the relationships between the quality of restorative dental care for 1,466 patients and 9 categories of dentist characteristics for 102 volunteer Washington practitioners. In this study, patients were recalled and restorations were examined clinically. Questionnaires were administered to patients and dentists. The dependent measure is a weighted average of scores for operative dentistry and crown and bridge. Stagewise regression was used to adjust for differences in patient oral health and assessor bias. Models were postulated in each category of dentist characteristics and beta vectors were estimated by multiple regression. The best predictors formed a significant model (p = 0.000) which explained 26 per cent of the variance.