A word-of-mouth perspective on consumers of family medicine services: a case study.

In an increasingly competitive health care market, family physicians have to elaborate and implement new strategies to attract potential patients. A useful and powerful method is word-of-mouth (WOM) because it shapes the consumers' attitudes and behaviours. Based on the recommendations of actual consumers, potential health care patients choose their family physicians. The aim of this study was to investigate the usefulness of WOM in family medicine and determine the key factors in recommending a certain family physician. The sample consisted of 338 patients under the supervision of a family physician, and the instrument for collecting data was a self-administered questionnaire. The findings revealed that the most important factors in spreading WOM are the communication skills and the expertise of the family physician. In addition, for patients between 27-33 years and 41-47 years, expertise is an absolute skill, whereas, for the health care consumers between 21 and 26 years, communication skills are essential in spreading WOM. Further, WOM becomes relevant in the family physician's activity as it may contribute to the delivery of value and in building sustainable physician-patient relationships.

The goldmine of patient satisfaction-interaction and communication in the context of infectious diseases.

This study aimed to investigate the patient satisfaction level in terms of communication and interaction with the physicians from a Romanian Infectious Disease hospital. The objectives of the study were related to the identification of the general level of satisfaction of the patients, the evaluation of the physicians' interaction type with their physicians, by using specific behavioral variables, such as respect and attention, as well as to determine the physician-patient communication quality. The data were collected with a self-administered questionnaire and were analyzed using IBM SPSS version 25. The sample comprised 82 patients who were hospitalized in the Department of Infectious Diseases. The quantitative variables were evaluated with the Shapiro-Wilk test and were described by the means and standard deviations, while the qualitative data were described by using the absolute values and percentages. The vast majority of patients were aged between 18-28 years old, were mostly females from urban areas, and 41.5% had university degrees. The outcomes of the study revealed that the general satisfaction of the patients, from a communication perspective, was reflected in the perceived and provided quality of information about the treatment. Although the vast majority of patients highly appreciated the interaction and the communication with their physicians, some individuals felt the need to read more information about their disease, especially from online sources, and they would have preferred their physicians to recommend trustful websites or health care platforms.