title: An experience of health services provided by a peripheral government teaching hospital in India: patients' perspective.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Patients' satisfaction has now become the most important and measurable aspect for assessing the quality of patient care services. For improvement of performance of any health system there is a need to assess patients' satisfaction as often as possible.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  1) To assess the level of patients' satisfaction as well as dissatisfaction regarding the services provided in the outdoor and indoor of different departments of a tertiary care hospital. 2) To find out the relation of some socio-demographic variables and different departments with the level of satisfaction if any.
  
  
  METHODS
  Two predesigned pretested interview schedule (separate for outdoor and indoor) was developed covering certain domains of patients care. Overall satisfaction level was determined by using summated Likert's score.
  
  
  RESULTS
  For outdoor, a little excess of half of the patients were satisfied in doctor-patient communication (51.0%), consultation room (53.5%), and overall (59.9%). The unsatisfied area was waiting place and time (38.6%). In the Indoor, 58.6% patients were satisfied with admission procedure, 53.2% for clinical care, 57.1% for nursing care and 45.3% with food services and the areas where more patients were not satisfied were cleanliness (40.4%), comfort (20.2%) and food services. G&O patients were less satisfied both in indoor and outdoor. Satisfaction level significantly increased with increase in age (P < 0.01),male patients (P < 0.01), lower education (P < .05) and surgical patients (P < 0.01).
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The level of patients' satisfaction showed deficiencies in different issues of hospital services, which should be given utmost importance by the hospital management authority for betterment.
authors: Department of Community Medicine, Medical College, Kolkata, India. dr.jhumasarkar@yahoo.in
authors: Jhuma
authors: J
authors: Sarkar
authors: Biswajit
authors: B
authors: Chatterjee
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration* / Q000592:standards*; D005260:Female; D006784:Hospitals, Teaching / Q000458:organization & administration* / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D017060:Patient Satisfaction; D015397:Program Evaluation; D055815:Young Adult