Over the past 20 years, patient satisfaction surveys have gained increasing attention as meaningful and essential sources of information for identifying gaps and developing an effective action plan for quality improvement in healthcare organizations.Healthcare managers thus incorporate patient centered care as a major component in the healthcare mission; they consider the patient’s perception when designing the strategies for quality improvement of care. Recently, the healthcare regulators shifted towards a market -driven approach of turning patient satisfaction surveys into a quality improvement tool for overall organizational performance.In Germany, measuring satisfaction has been required since 2005 as an element of quality management reports. Since 2002, the Department of Health (DOH) has launched a national survey program in which all NHS (National Health Service) in England have to survey patient satisfaction on an annual basis and report the results to their regulators. Therefore, measurement of patient satisfaction is a legitimate indicator for improving the services and strategic goals for all healthcare organizations.Patient satisfaction is usually defined as patient-reported experiences but a lot of others definitions also exist like for example:- Patient satisfaction mostly appears to represent attitudes towards care or aspects of care.- Patients’ emotions, feelings and their perception of delivered healthcare services.- The degree of congruency between patient expectations of ideal care and their perceptions of real care received.Patients’ evaluation of care is a realistic tool to provide opportunity for improvement, enhance strategic decision making, reduce cost, meet patients' expectations, frame strategies for effective management, monitor healthcare performance of health plans and provide benchmarking across the healthcare institutions.In addition, due to the tendency of healthcare industries to concentrate on patient-centered care; patient satisfaction reflects patients' involvement in decision making and their role as partners in improving the quality of healthcare services.A study in USA examined the correlation between demographic factors such as age, gender, health status and level of education with patient satisfaction. However, the findings from these studies showed that male patients, patients older than 50 years of age, patients who had a shorter length of stay or better health status and those with primary level education had higher scores related to variable health service-related domains.Another study in Taiwan found that patient characteristics such as age, gender and education level only slightly influenced patient satisfaction but that the health status of patients is an important predictor of a patient’s overall satisfaction.And another remarkable outcome of four studies conducted in tertiary hospitals in different countries revealed that the nurses' courtesy, respect, careful listening and easy access of care was particularly the strongest driver of overall patient satisfaction. These aspects of nursing care are highly ranked by patients compared to other independent factors such as physician care, admission process, physical environment and cleanliness.All the above-mentioned studies lead us to a conclusion, which states that Patient satisfaction is not a clearly defined concept, although it is identified as an important quality outcome indicator to measure success of the services delivery system. Patient evaluation of care is important to provide opportunity for improvement such as strategic framing of health plans, which sometimes exceed patient expectations and benchmarking.
What type of descriptive research was used in order to measure the level of patient’s satisfaction in the above-mentioned hospitals/countries? According to the case, how can the results of such a research benefit the health care sector?
One of the studies showed that patient’s satisfaction is directly related to level of service provided by nurses. As a researcher, suggest another type of research that can be used by hospitals in order to improve the service provided by nurses. Justify your answer.
If you were to decide on a scaling technique to study the correlation between “patient’s satisfaction” and “demographic factors; which one would you choose? Justify.
Develop four questions that can be used to measure patient’s satisfaction in a hospital, noting that those questions should rely on a scale.

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