Patient Satisfaction One Major Criteria on Evaluating Performance of Health Centres (Essay Sample)

Patient Satisfaction One Major Criteria on Evaluating Performance of Health Centres
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Introduction
The research conducted by the Medical Group Association (MGMA), in 2013, generated a report from their findings indicating that almost 80 percent of the healthcare practices that are considered as "better performing" was due to the patient satisfaction surveys. The top rated healthcare providers rated as best and high performers studied their patients and carried out the surveys more frequently as compared to other practices. Patient surveys do not just improve the communication and performance with the patients. Customer satisfaction measures have in the past years been used by the government and other companies to assess their performance. The use of patient surveys in any institution can help in the preparation of meeting the future and unpredictable patient’s satisfaction requirements. Measuring and reporting on the patient satisfaction with health care have become a significant industry. Patient satisfaction measures have been taken into much consideration such that each and every hospital and health plan quality find it mandatory to include it in their reports. The trend has resulted in the rise of armies of consultants who make a living by selling software packages to healthcare providers. The healthcare providers that purchase the software packages can monitor their customers’ reactions by modem, fax, and telephone. It goes without saying that healthcare administrators in different healthcare institutions usually have reams of patient satisfaction report at their desk that they must go through. The much workload and effort that comes with the need to know the patients’ reaction so as to meet their requirements raises the question of whether patient satisfaction is worth measuring. Another vital issue is whether the people that collect the reports and analyse the results know how to use the data. The question of how the survey or how can patient satisfaction be evaluated is necessary to ensure a successful healthcare performance.[Rosenthal GE, Harper DL. Cleveland health quality choice: a model for collaborative community-based outcomes assessment. Joint Comm J Qual Improv. 1994;20(8):425–42.]
The question of whether patient satisfaction is worth measuring depends on the person asked. The question can either be directed to the marketing specialists, consumer advocates, and the proponents of patient-centred care. However, the same question can be channelled to the sceptics who believe that focusing of the patient satisfaction deters attention from what ought to be of the principal of concerns in an era of resource constraints, improper care and clinical outcomes such as morbidity, mortality and health status. The collection of data on a patient is much easier to acquire as compared to the measure of technical quality. Therefore, many healthcare organizations have succumbed to the temptation to stop there. The primary goal in medicine is helping patients achieve their objectives. However, the patients’ goals vary, and are not predictable due to the demographic and disease factors, and are subject to change; this makes it difficult in determining what the patients’ desire and their requirement. In order curb the challenge of the varying patient needs, it is necessary to question the individual patients on what their needs are and whether their needs are satisfied. The perspective of questioning the patients is considered an ethical and professional imperative. Medical groups, health plans, individual clinicians and hospitals have their reason for conducting patient satisfaction surveys. Patient satisfaction usually raises many arguments on whether patient satisfaction is necessary and whether satisfaction can be measured reproducibly concerning the place of patient ratings and catalogue of healthcare outcomes reports.[Spoeri RK, Ullman R. Measuring and reporting managed care performance: lessons learned and new initiatives. Ann Intern Med. 1997;127(8 pt 2):726–32.]
Many critical measurement issues would have to be addressed if patient satisfaction were to take place alongside mortality, functional status, and morbidity. First, there need to be an explicit and detailed understanding of what the scale developers and end-users are measuring. Patients’ satisfaction is considered as a distillation of perceptions and values rather than a unique concept. The patients’ beliefs about occurrences are what is referred to as perception while values are the weights that the individual patients apply to those events. Values indicated the degree to which patients consider the different circumstances that they undergo through as either desirable, expected or necessary.
The rising need to acquire patient satisfaction report has led to the emergence of hybrid questions that aid in the assessment of the patients’ perception and values concurrently. An example of such questions, "How satisfied were you today with the amount of time that you spent with the doctor?" Any patient asked this issue would have first to make an estimation of the quantity of time they spent with the doctor before giving an answer. Secondly the patient would also have to compare the total time spent with the physician with an internal standard before making the final judgement. Despite the fact that such hybrid question has the virtue of linguistic economy they make it difficult to differentiate between values and perceptions. Patients that either receives inadequate care but low standards and those that receive excellent care and high standards may report the same satisfaction.
Although dividing patient satisfaction into various parts has its advantages, numerous research articles view satisfaction as a black box that helps in the prediction of particular outcomes and is in turn predicted by certain antecedents. New relationships can be created or revealed once the black box is opened. A report by Zemencuk on a survey involving 652 patients and 105 physicians in four key care sites in Michigan and Ontario. The study involved asking patients about their desires individually and their expectation. According to the survey, a patients’ desire is want they want while a patient’s expectations is what they anticipate occurring in the future. The results of the research specified that there were no significant differences in the desires of the patients’ cross-world. However, the American patients as compared to the Canadian patients were more likely to claim that their expectations and desires are either, prostrate-specific antigen, mammography, rectal examinations or cholesterol testing. A conclusion from the report is that the differences in the desires were either influenced by either the cultural factors or priming by the experience of the individuals.[Patrick DL, Scrivens E, Charlton JRH. Disability and patient satisfaction with medical care. Med Care. 1983;21:1062–75.]
The second important issue and question to ensure patient satisfaction is whether the data analysts or the people that collect and analyse the data knows how to use the data. It, therefore, leads to the concern of finding out the relation between the patient satisfaction, health outcomes and the process of care. Over the past patient satisfaction in medical care has been considered to reflect the satisfaction of how the care is delivered and the outcomes of the care. For instance, a patient undergoing surgery may be highly satisfied with the attentiveness if the surgical staff but, on the other hand, disappointed with his rate of recovery. However, several studies have it that health status rather than the degree of improvement in health status are most likely to have influence on the satisfaction of the patient. According to , a study was carried out to estimate the impact of health status on an intrinsic characteristic and health status as a result of care. The research involved 455 elderly patients discharged from University Hospitals of Cleveland, Convinsky and colleagues. The outcomes of the study point to that the short-term improvement in health status was in no way connected with higher satisfaction after controlling for health status at discharge. The conclusion drawn from the findings was that there exists a tendency for recovered patients to record greater satisfaction rather than for patients whose health has improved due to medical care to report greater satisfaction.[4 Patrick DL, Scrivens E, Charlton JRH. Disability and patient satisfaction with medical care. Med Care. 1983;21:1062–75.]
The third measurement issue concerns whether to adjust for patient characteristics that influence achievement when comparing health care providers. The majority of the managed care organisation tend to put more effort on patient satisfaction so as to increase their bonus payments. Critics argue that adjusting away variable dooms it to irrelevance while proponents say that the criterion is a way of levelling of the play field. The purpose of the measurement determines whether or not to apply or adjust. If the measurement was carried out f...