Searching for the most suitable tool to measure satisfaction with healthcare: the importance of patient discontent

Esperanza Vera-Toscano, Victoria Ateca-Amestoy and Rafael Serrano-del-Rosal

IESA Working Papers Series from Institute for Social Syudies of Andalusia - Higher Council for Scientific Research

Abstract: User´s satisfaction is an important tool to evaluate the performance of healthcare services. This paper aims to provide the most suitable measure of quality assessment that can help policy-makers in the design and implementation of programs oriented to successfully increase healthcare satisfaction. In doing so, a comparative study is proposed to simultaneously study the effects of individual and market characteristics on two alternative measures of user’s quality assessment, namely: (1) level of confidence with the service provided (5-point Likert scale response), and (2) whether or not you would recommend the service to a friend or relative (dichotomous response). Results indicate that there seems to be an invariant relationship between the two alternative variables and the latent and unobserved variable on users’ global satisfaction opinion or service quality assessment. However, when considering the different dimensions of the service provided, there is a different ranking on the relevance of these dimensions, with the relative importance for the 5 points variable being more equilibrated than the binary choice one. This observation has important implications for health policy management. It is suggested that the dichotomous response is a better tool to highlighting areas of patient discontent.

Keywords: Patient satisfaction; determinants; dimensions; health policy management. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2005
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://iesaa.csic.es/RePEc/pdf/dependent.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Failed to connect to FTP server iesaa.csic.es: No such host is known.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:esa:iesawp:0504

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IESA Working Papers Series from Institute for Social Syudies of Andalusia - Higher Council for Scientific Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Luis Miguel Miller ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).