A Cross Sectional Study Among Patients Attending NEIAH Hospital OPD To Evaluate The Level of Satisfaction and Analyze The Factors Related

Abstract Background: Patient satisfaction survey is a valuable tool to measure the services provided by the hospitals. Patient satisfaction is a key determinant of quality of health care and may draw attention from the health care providers, administrators, and health policy makers, in order to monitor the performance, understand patients’ needs, plan the further development of hospital services. Further, as a huge number of patients visit the Out Patient Department (OPD) for clinical services, this becomes a very crucial area of hospital services and the patient satisfaction to OPD services becomes the key determinant for the assessment of quality of patient care. Thus, there is a need to assess the patient satisfaction regarding the Out Patient department of a hospital. Methods: A cross-sectional study was carried out in 100 patients attending outpatient department of North Eastern Institute of Ayurveda and Homoeopathy, Shillong. The patients were selected randomly from different specialty departments. The study was conducted for 15 days. All patients were interviewed by using pre-structured questionnaires which included physical facilities, registration service, doctor services, nurses/attending staff, laboratory staff services, expenses, pharmacy services and quality of services. The structured questionnaires included in this study had to be replied in choices of strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, strongly disagree (based on Likert’s 5-point scale). Consent of each patient was taken verbally. Results: A total of 100 OPD patients were included in the study. Majority of them were satisfied with the facilities available as well as the behavior of the doctors and other health staff. The overall satisfaction was noticed in maximum of the patients. Conclusion: According to patient satisfaction survey, the study revealed that the degree of satisfaction was high with respect to physical facilities, registration services, doctor’s services, laboratory and expenses, pharmacy services. The healthcare delivery can be further improved by monitoring the delivery of quality care on ongoing basis.