Working with Aggressive Patients in Dental Practice

In medical practice physicians and other health workers meet patients of inadequate and abnormal behavior on daily basis. That kind of behavior manifests as: Placing unrealistic requests in the sense of their treatment: submitting them disrespectful of the line and order, no charge for the treatment, they create their own medical treatments because they know the best what they need, they set the time-limit-now, they are never content with the quality of prosthetic works, they keep asking for corrections, have unrealistic expectations from the effects of prosthetic works (they want to be able to “bite the wood”, to look younger, etc), they threat that they will send notifications to Ministry of Health Care, media, their speech dominates with sarcasm, cynicism, negativism, obstructive behavior; Very aggressive behavior (anger without any reason, verbal or even physical confrontations with the staff, yelling, spitting, slamming and inventory damaging); Problematic behavior and possible problematic behavior of a number of patients who really have mental health problems (hysterias, PTSP, drug addicts) or they have some kind of psychiatric illness (depressions, schizophrenias). Analyzing examples from practice we came to the conclusion that this kind of patients’ behavior is caused by several elements: a number of patients has the need for social contacts because they are lonely in everyday life: retired people (especially the ones with no family), housewives whose family members have no time for their “troubles”, most of the time they come to the place where they must be talked and listened to – medical service center. Some patients think that they have the right to anything even the things that are nonexistent in nomenclature of medical services just because they are medically insured and they own health record; they are especially furious because of the participation in costs of prosthetic works (“the staff takes that for themselves”), they constantly look for flaws in done works and they come for unnecessary corrections many times. Aggression in communication are demonstrated by: alcohol intoxicated persons, drug addicts, “difficult persons” who consider arguments and insulting a normal way of communication, persons who consider themselves very important on social hierarchy (you don’t know who I am, who is my husband etc), persons who consider that injustice is constantly brought on them, persons who are psychiatric patients and are not taking prescribed therapy, so one never knows when they are in their “bad” phase. This kind of behavior of patients has negative effect on two accounts: on other patients who are in the waiting room and often spend much more time there they should which makes them anxious and also creates negative attitudes and reactions because of the problems that the medical staff has with problematic patients. Medical staff is constantly under pressure which inevitably leads to stress, and they are often in situation that they a