Cataract surgery: an analysis of patient satisfaction with medical care

Introduction: Patient satisfaction is a good performance indicator for meas uring the quality of health care delivered by hospitals. Satisfaction is un derstood to be the positive difference between users' perceptions of their experience at the moment of discharge and their expectations at the moment of admission. Objective: To evaluate the expectations and the perceived qua lity of care in cataract surgery patients attending Hospital Clinic (HC). M ethod: A two-stage descriptive study carried out at the HC in Barcelona, Sp ain. The target population consisted of patients operated on for cataracts during the 1996 calendar year. Two study groups were established: Group I, patients attending outpatient service before admission; and Group II, patie nts attending outpatient service after surgery. After informed consent was obtained, the patients were directly interviewed by three researchers espec ially trained for that purpose. The questionnaire included demographic vari ables and 31 questions related to expectations, all to be answered by means of a 7 points Likert's visual scale. All statistical calculations were per formed using the SPSS(R) program for Microsoft Windows(R). Results: A total of 148 interviews were performed: 80 (54.1%) in Group I and 68 (45.9%) in Group II. The mean age was 64.2 +/- 11.6 years. The difference between scor es at admission and at discharge was nearly significant (p = 0.064) for the "information" component. Conclusions: The study of several fields where th e patient's expectations are higher or lower contributes to prioritizing ef forts to improve quality. There is a need for a frequent review and update of any patient satisfaction evaluation tools that are used.