Patient satisfaction is a measure of the extent to which a

patient A patient is any recipient of health care services that are performed by healthcare professionals. The patient is most often ill or injured and in need of treatment by a physician, nurse, optometrist, dentist, veterinarian, or other health c ...

content Content or contents may refer to: Media * Content (media), information or experience provided to audience or end-users by publishers or media producers ** Content industry, an umbrella term that encompasses companies owning and providing mas ...

with the

health care Health care or healthcare is the improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people. Health care is delivered by health profe ...

which they received from their

health care provider A health care provider is an individual health professional or a health facility organization licensed to provide health care diagnosis and treatment services including medication, surgery and medical devices. Health care providers often receive ...

. In evaluations of

health care quality Health care quality is a level of value provided by any health care resource, as determined by some measurement. As with quality in other fields, it is an assessment of whether something is good enough and whether it is suitable for its purpose. T ...

, patient satisfaction is a

performance indicator A performance indicator or key performance indicator (KPI) is a type of performance measurement. KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity (such as projects, programs, products and other initiatives) in which it en ...

measured in a

self-report study A self-report study is a type of survey, questionnaire, or poll in which respondents read the question and select a response by themselves without any outside interference. A ''self-report'' is any method which involves asking a participant abou ...

and a specific type of

customer satisfaction Customer satisfaction (often abbreviated as CSAT) is a term frequently used in marketing. It is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation. Customer satisfaction is defined as "the number of ...

metric.

Validity as a metric for evaluating health care quality

Because patients may be dissatisfied with health care which improves their health or satisfied with health care which does not, there are circumstances in which patient satisfaction is not a valid indicator of health care quality even though it is often used as such. Many studies in acute medicine have failed to identify a relationship between patient satisfaction and health care quality. However, in long term conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and other chronic inflammatory arthritides patient satisfaction with care has been measured reliably and shown to be an outcome of care.

Factors influencing patient satisfaction

Patients' satisfaction with an encounter with

health care service Health care or healthcare is the improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people. Health care is delivered by health profes ...

is mainly dependent on the duration and efficiency of care, and how empathetic and communicative the health care providers are.Simple Tips to Improve Patient Satisfaction
By Michael Pulia. American Academy of Emergency Medicine. 2011;18(1):18–19. It is favored by a good doctor-patient relationship. Also, patients who are well-informed of the necessary procedures in a clinical encounter, and the time it is expected to take, are generally more satisfied even if there is a longer waiting time. Another critical factor influencing patient satisfaction is the job satisfaction experienced by the care-provider.

By region

In the United States, hospitals whose

surgery Surgery ''cheirourgikē'' (composed of χείρ, "hand", and ἔργον, "work"), via la, chirurgiae, meaning "hand work". is a medical specialty that uses operative manual and instrumental techniques on a person to investigate or treat a pat ...

patients reported being highly satisfied also performed higher quality surgical procedures. The implication of this is that there does not need to be trade-off between high patient satisfaction and quality patient care. The

Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) refers to a set of surveys that ask patients to report on their health care experiences. The surveys are free to anyone who wants to use them. They focus on aspects of healthcare qualit ...

or CAHPS survey is an ongoing research project to guide the development of consumer surveys being used assess the quality of care provided by health plans, physician groups, and clinicians. It is an example of a major research effort which studies the significance of consumer responses to surveys.

Research

By 1998 the process of measuring and reporting of patient satisfaction had become an established industry. A concern about asking patients about the quality of their care is that patients tend to be more satisfied by attractive healthcare than by effective healthcare, and satisfaction reports may not give good information about the ability of a hospital, doctor, or treatment to improve their health. Higher patient satisfaction have been associated with less emergency department use but with greater inpatient use, higher overall health care and prescription drug expenditures, and increased mortality. Despite these concerns, more and more research has established customer satisfaction as a valid and reliable measure of customer behaviors and organizational performance. reduced complaint behavior about their

primary care physician A primary care physician (PCP) is a physician who provides both the first contact for a person with an undiagnosed health concern as well as continuing care of varied medical conditions, not limited by cause, organ system, or diagnosis. The term ...

, and lower likelihood of terminating a relationship Among healthcare consumers—i.e., patients—satisfaction is best understood as a multi-attribute model with different aspects of care determining overall satisfaction. Importantly, lower performance on an attribute creates much more dissatisfaction than the satisfaction generated by higher performance on an attribute; in other words, negative performance is more consequential than positive performance. Thus, ensuring overall patient satisfaction, it is more important to reduce negative performance on the patient-care dimension with the worst perceived performance than to maximize positive performance on another dimension. A fruitful solution can be measuring patient dissatisfaction instead of satisfaction.Omid Rasouli and Mohammad Hossein Zarei, "Monitoring and Reducing Patient Dissatisfaction: A Case Study of an Iranian Public Hospital", Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, vol. 27 no. 5-6, pp. 531-559, 2016. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14783363.2015.1016869

References

{{reflist Product testing Health care quality Patient