Health services quality: recording views and degree of patient satisfaction

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Patient’s views regarding the quality of health services and their satisfaction from them are important criteria as they contribute to tracing the critical dimensions that need improvement and to discovering the necessary solutions.

Purpose: Investigating the quality of health services through the recording of views and the degree of patient satisfaction.

Material and Method: A cross-sectional study was conducted with convenience sampling. The people studied were 102 patients hospitalized in clinics of the general hospital of Thessaloniki. The appropriate standardized SERVQUAL questionnaire was used for the data collection. Data analysis was performed with the IBM SPSS 24.0 version software program.

Results: It was found from the results of the study that patient satisfaction regarding health services is high (85%). Moreover, it was found that patients consider all dimensions equally important: assurance (87%), empathy (86%), responsiveness (85%), tangibles (84.5%) and reliability (83%). It was also concluded from the study that there was a deviation between the desired and the perceived quality of services regarding the dimension of assurance (0.57%) and of responsiveness (0.43%).

Conclusions: Patient satisfaction from the quality of services of the general hospital of Thessaloniki was high while at the same time, some fields that need improvement stood out. Such findings, in combination with integration in the system for managing the evaluation of the quality of health services provided, can be important material for the management of the hospital and significantly contribute to the upgrading of the hospital. There is also a need to continuously measuring patient satisfaction aiming at upgrading health services.

Keywords: patient satisfaction, quality of services, Servqual