Measuring Patient Satisfaction: A Cross Sectional Study to Improve Quality of Care at Medical and Dental Teaching Hospital of Haryana

Against a background of growing consumerism, satisfying patients has become a key task for all healthcare activities. Objective of the study is to measure the patient satisfaction in health care facilities at teaching hospital of Haryana in India.

A cross sectional study was conducted to assess the patient satisfaction level visiting the hospital with the objective to know the patients satisfaction on the basis of various parameters like Admission procedure, Physical facilities, Behavior and Cleanliness. A pre-designed peer reviewed 27-items questionnaire given to patients, who had undergone some treatment. Equal numbers of random samples were selected from the medical and the dental teaching hospital set-ups.

A total of (n=182) from Dental and Medical Hospital patients were included in the study. It was found that most of the respondents were from Rural areas (i.e. 87.3% in medical and 66.5% in dental) because of the location of the hospital. The maximum patients had low level of education. Patients were more satisfied with respect to the admission procedure in medical hospital (42.5%) and in dental (48.9%) facilities. Most of the patients strongly agreed to the satisfactory doctor's behavior in medical (43.0%) and in dental (46.7%). It was also observed that the patients were not satisfied with the number of appointments given to them.

The study findings suggest that some measures must be taken by the policy makers and hospital administrators so as to increase the patient satisfaction at health care facilities. In a country struck by the low satisfaction of health services, it becomes mandatory on the part of hospital management to satisfy the human need of the patients.