Lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on patient satisfaction of English dental service: Sentiment analysis and topic modelling of online reviews

Aims This study aimed to determine how changes in English dental practice during and after the COVID pandemic impacted patient perceptions of dental care delivery use sentiment analysis and topic extraction of online reviews Methods Reviews were collected from the NHS website using webscraping and the NHS digital API. Reviews were grouped into pre-, during-, and post pandemic phases, and subcategorised to align with the dates of national standard operating procedures. The AWS Detect Sentiment API categorized each review by sentiment and Non-Negative Matrix Factorization was used to identify topics in positive and negative reviews. Results 48,862 reviews were analysed. Reviews were consistently positive (81.52% pre-; 82.88% during, 82.48% post-) The proportion of Negative reviews decreased (13.87% pre- ,11.54% during-, 9.72% post-). For negative reviews, staff behaviour and professionalism prevalent topics in all time periods. During the pandemic, topics of treatment costs and poor communication emerged. In positive reviews, patient comfort and anxiety management were consistently identified. Appreciation for COVID-19 precautions emerged as a new theme during the pandemic. Conclusions Unstructured patient feedback is a rich data source to assess patient experiences. This research suggests appointment management, communication, and staff interactions are priorities for quality improvement in NHS dentistry.