An experience of health services provided by a peripheral government teaching hospital in India: Patients' perspective.

ABSTRACT

Background: Patients' satisfaction has now become the most important and measurable aspect for assessing the quality of patient care services. For improvement of performance of any health system there is a need to assess patients' satisfaction as often as possible. Objectives: 1) To assess the level of patients' satisfaction as well as dissatisfaction regarding the services provided in the outdoor and indoor of different departments of a tertiary care hospital. 2) To find out the relation of some socio-demographic variables and different departments with the level of satisfaction if any. Materials and Methods: Two predesigned pretested interview schedule (separate for outdoor and indoor) was developed covering certain domains of patients care. Overall satisfaction level was determined by using summated Likert's score. Results: For outdoor, a little excess of half of the patients were satisfied in doctor-patient communication(51.0%),consultation room(53.5%), and overall(59.9%).The unsatisfied area was waiting place and time(38.6%).In the Indoor, 58.6% patients were satisfied with admission procedure,53.2% for clinical care,57.1% for nursing care and 45.3% with food services and the areas where more patients were not satisfied were cleanliness(40.4%),comfort(20.2%) and food services.G&O patients were less satisfied both in indoor and outdoor. Satisfaction level significantly increased with increase in age (P<0.01),male patients (P<0.01),lower education(P<.05) and surgical patients(P<0.01). Conclusion: The level of patients' satisfaction showed deficiencies in different issues of hospital services, which should be given utmost importance by the hospital management authority for betterment.