The Moderating Effects of Gender between Patient Intimacy, Trust, and Loyalty

This research examines the moderating effects of gender on the relationship between a patient's intimacy and trust. This study used patients as sample who frequently visit the health care clinics (medical specialist). A sample of 357 respondents were selected using convenience sampling. To examine the first hypothesis, a two-way Anova was used. To examine the second hypothesis, a simple regression was used. The results reveal that the influence of patient intimacy on trust between the male patients and female patients is different. The influence of patient intimacy on the trust in female patients is higher than that in male patients of the medical specialists. An important implication of our study is that the medical specialists need to increase their quality of communications and social interactions to their patients.