A Study on Patient Satisfaction through Extemporaneous Responses from Patients in a Tertiary Care Hospital

Understanding satisfaction and service quality have, for some considerable time, been recognized as critical to developing service improvement strategies. The inaugural quality assurance work of Donabedian (1980) identified the importance of patient satisfaction as well as providing much of the basis for research in the area of quality assurance in healthcare1. Based on this a study was conducted a study at Nizam's institute of medical sciences, a renowned tertiary care hospital, with a very short questionnaire consisting of two questions to know spontaneous responses from patients/attendants about services which gave them maximum satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Results showed that the most satisfying factor was doctors services rendered to the patients and the most dissatisfying factor was regarding housekeeping services of the hospital. It could be noted that majority of patients were happy with doctor services, but considerable portion of patients showed dissatisfaction towards nursing and housekeeping services, which are to be considered seriously by the hospital management. Few patients responded with communication gap with doctors and other hospital staff. Around half of the patients showed dissatisfaction because of delay in services. On the whole patient satisfaction is mediocre and has great scope for improvement, which can be done through proper planning, monitoring and appraisal.