Introduction: Patient satisfaction has an impact on quality of care and treatment compliance. It is the desired outcome of every health facility as it is simple and cost-effective way for evaluation of services. The poor patient satisfaction causes poor compliance to treatment which ultimately leads to poor health outcomes. Present study attempts to study perceived satisfaction of cancer patients regarding on health care and behavior of hospital staff for the purpose of quality care assessment. Methods: Present study is based on detailed findings under ICMR sponsored project “Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) Use among Cancer Patients”. A mixed model approach consisting both qualitative as well as quantitative studies was adopted for exploring opinions of patients and their perceived satisfaction levels. Information was collected by conducting interviews among 1117 patients of different types of cancer at different stages attending allopathic treatment at the health facility. Results: Among all 1117 cancer patients including 501(44.9%) males and 616(55.1%) females, overall, 1006(90.0%) patients were satisfied with the services available at the current health facility. Satisfaction rate with the health facility was increased further from 90.0% to 93.9% at the end of follow-up. Satisfaction rates were increased from 98.3% to 96.4%, 96.2% to 95.3% and 97.4% to 95.6% for doctors’ nurses and MRD staff respectively. Overcrowding followed by long waiting time came out to be main reasons of dissatisfaction. Satisfaction of patient was not significantly associated with gender. There were statistically non- significant gaps in expectations of patients at the baseline and their fulfillments at the end indicating quality care provided at the health facility. Conclusions: Study has demonstrated high levels of perceived patient satisfaction with services available at the health facility which increased further during the course of follow-up. The study suggests the need of continued evaluation of quality of health care and behavior of staff and continuing efforts for consistency of satisfaction levels. More in -depth studies are desired to attain some logical conclusions on factors governing satisfaction of cancer patients.
Comments
No have any comment !