Satisfaction of Clients of Inpatient Department at Central and General Hospitals Under the Office of the Permanent Secretary for Public Health, Year 2017

Abstract

This survey research aimed to assess and compare satisfaction of clients of in-patient departments at centrals and general hospitals in Thailand. It was conducted among patients ramdomly selected from central and genral hospitals throughout the country. The data collection tool was a questionnaire containing 5 levels of scale on 4 areas: (1) service procedures, (2) service personnel, (3) hospital facilities, and (4) service outcomes. The tool had passed the validity checked, with the IOC (index of item-objective congruence) value of 0.80-1.00, and the confidence score (Cronbach’s alpha) of 0.87. There were 77 participating hospitals in the study: 27 centrl hospitals (the category A hospitals), 27 general hospitals (the category S hospitals) and 23 category M1 general hospitals. The number of samples was 26,411 based on sample size calculation using Yamane formula. Data were collected by the quality development unit of each hospital; and forwarded to the data aggregation unit through an online system; and were analyzed by using percentages and one-way ANOVA. It was found that majority of the samples were female aged 30-59 years, with secondary education/diploma, and were employees, unskilled workers, famers, traders, or private business owners. Majority of them were in-patients of medicine or surgery departments and from special wards The overall satisfaction level was at 79.40%, the highest satisfaction was on the service personnel, and the lowest was on service facilities. As for the satisfaction areas, the samples specified that: (1) the highest satisfaction regarding the service procedures was on the provision of services which was in non-discrimination sequence; but low satisfaction was on the complecated and inconvenient services, (2) the highest satisfaction regarding service personnel was on the honesty of hospital staff, and lowest on low attention and low enthusiasm of personnel, (3) for the service facilities, high satisfaction was on the instruction signs and clear public information, and lowest on the limitation of feedback chanels, and (4) the highest satisfaction regarding service quality was on the good service quality, and lowest satisfaction on the cost-benefit of the services. Comparing satisfaction by gender and education status, the samples had similar level of satisfaction. Patients aged 60 years and civil servants expressed highest satisfaction whereas those who were company employees had lowest satisfaction. The samples expressed high satisfaction on ICU ward, and lowest on medicine ward. Comparing the satisfaction with the hospital size, it was found that there was higher satisfaction toward general hospitals (S). In conclusion, this research provided useful information on the comparision of the hospital performance and stimulated the improvement toward beteer quality, continuity and sustainably of services.