Discuss experiences of health care and the factors that may influence patient satisfaction with reference to health inequalities.
The satisfaction of consumers with a particular product or service has become an important measure of quality in many areas of the public sector. Over the past decades the increased “consumerism” of health services has led to higher expectations, which in turn led to regular measurement of patients’ satisfaction with the care they received. It is believed that patients are the best to judge it, as they “literally feel it in their skin whether care is good or bad”. There is, however, a subjective nature to quantitative measures of satisfaction and results need to be assessed in a number of different ways.
Over time the surveys have identified the importance of healthy and equitable communication between doctor and patient for a positive health outcome . At the beginning of the 20the century the doctor-patient relationship was what we now describe as a paternalistic one, the doctor taking full control over the treatment and not educating the patent in any way. It is understandable …show more content…
The Wall Street Journal carried out an online questionnaire in 2004, which revealed that people, above anything else, want to be treated with dignity and respect, closely followed by the wish to finding it easy to talk to their doctor (84%). This lies four percent above the skills related to medical knowledge. These findings go against the results from our patient satisfaction survey, carried out at the beginning of this year, where almost all people rated the positive treatment outcome and the knowledge and skill of their doctor as being more important to them than the ability to put trust in him, at least for the two age groups we analysed (youngest and oldest age group) (Figure