RESEARCH ARTICLE
Patient Satisfaction and the Right to Health: A Survey in a Rehabilitation Clinic in Switzerland
Emmanuel Kabengele Mpinga1, 3, *, Henk Verloo2, Philippe Chastonay3
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2013Volume: 6
First Page: 51
Last Page: 58
Publisher ID: TOPHJ-6-51
DOI: 10.2174/1874944501306010051
Article History:
Received Date: 18/06/2013Revision Received Date: 23/09/2013
Acceptance Date: 25/09/2013
Electronic publication date: 18/10/2013
Collection year: 2013
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Background:
The complex nature of the right to health requires multiple indicators to cover all facets. Patient satisfaction (PS) has been proposed as a possible indicator, but no survey has explored the implementation of this indicator and its utility in promoting the right to health.
Objectives:
The aim of the present work is to demonstrate the utility of PS as an indicator of the right to health. The objectives of the survey are to identify problems in different domains of the right to health, to analyse possible explanatory factors and to discuss the conditions of the use of PS as a reliable indicator.
Method:
A retrospective survey using a satisfaction questionnaire was administered to 5,521 hospitalised patients of a rehabilitation clinic in Switzerland between 1 January 2006 and 31 July 2010. A dissatisfaction rate of more than 10% was used as a cut-off point.
Results:
Some 2,788 patients returned the satisfaction questionnaire, representing 50.4% of the target population. Eightynine per cent of the patients expressed general satisfaction. The coordination between intervening healthcare workers (27.2%), the information received (21.5%), the quality of some delivered care (15.1%) and the accessibility to services such as transportation (15.1%) were identified as domains with problems in terms of the right to health and improvements were expected. Satisfaction rates were gender and age dependent as well as related to the length and number of stays within the clinic.
Conclusion:
PS is an interesting indicator of the right to health as a reliable process. It can be used to complement data provided by other more classical right to health indicators.
