Abstract:

As patient satisfaction is regarded as an important indicator in assessing the quality of care especially for the last twenty years, there is an increasing interest on perceptions of patients about the provision of health care. The factors affecting patient satisfaction should be reliability defined and the areas of an organization which can be intervened should be determined in order to provide the quality of services as well as to use the resources of hospital efficiently and effectiveness in terms of modem hospital management. This study aims at developing a relaible and multidimension questionnaire to support the operational and strategic decisions of hospital management related to the quality of services, and at determining factors affecting satisfaction level of in patients. The study sample is comprised of 302 inpatients in Ankara Numune Training and Reserach Hospital, between 1-15 July 2004. In the study, a questionnaire was developed to explore the assessment of patients about their care. The satisfaction level of patients was measured with 22 questions. After factor analysis, it was found that questions were gathered around in five factors and the general reliability coefficient was 0.91. Regression analyses were carried out to find out how patients' assessments about their medical treatment were affected from demographic characteristics. The results of regression analyses revealed that older patients and patients who had higher education and stayed in internal clinics had higher satisfaction than counterparts. In this study, 15.5% of general satisfaction were explained. This indicates that there are still very important loopholes in our understanding of factors affecting satisfaction. At this point, it can be suggested that a qualitative approach can be used in order to find out the variance that could not be explained by used variables.

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