title: Heart Surgery Waiting Time: Assessing the Effectiveness of an Action.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Waiting time is an index assessing patient satisfaction, managerial effectiveness and horizontal equity in providing health care. Although heart surgery centers establishment is attractive for politicians. They are always faced with the question of to what extent they solve patient's problems.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  The objective of this study was to evaluate factors influencing waiting time in patients of heart surgery centers, and to make recommendations for health-care policy-makers for reducing waiting time and increasing the quality of services from this perspective.
  
  
  METHODS
  This cross-sectional study was performed in 2013. After searching articles on PubMed, Elsevier, Google Scholar, Ovid, Magiran, IranMedex, and SID, a list of several criteria, which relate to waiting time, was provided. Afterwards, the data on waiting time were collected by a researcher-structured checklist from 156 hospitalized patients. The data were analyzed by SPSS 16. The Kolmogorov Smirnov and Shapiro tests were used for determination of normality. Due to the non-normal distribution, non-parametric tests, such as Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney were chosen for reporting significance. Parametric tests also used reporting medians.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Among the studied variables, just economic status had a significant relation with waiting time (P = 0.37). Fifty percent of participants had diabetes, whereas this estimate was 43.58% for high blood pressure. As the cause of delay, 28.2% of patients reported financial problems, 18.6% personal problem and 13.5% a delay in providing equipment by the hospital.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  It seems the studied hospital should review its waiting time arrangements and detach them, as far as possible, from subjective and personal (specialists) decisions. On the other hand, ministries of health and insurance companies should consider more financial support. It is also recommend that hospitals should arrange preoperational psychiatric consultation for increasing patients' emotionally readiness.
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Management and Economics, School of Public Health, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, IR Iran.
authors.forename: Abbas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Badakhshan
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Management and Economics, School of Public Health, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, IR Iran.
authors.forename: Mohammad
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Arab
authors.affiliation: Gastroenterology and Hepatology Research Center, Golestan University of Medical Sciences, Gorgan, IR Iran.
authors.forename: Mahin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gholipour
authors.affiliation: Public Health Department, School of Health, Golestan University of Medical Sciences, Gorgan, IR Iran.
authors.forename: Naser
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Behnampour
authors.affiliation: Amir Al-momenin Hospital, School of Medicine, Golestan University of Medical Sciences, Gorgan, IR Iran.
authors.forename: Saeid
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Saleki
keywords: Cardiovascular Surgical Procedures; Coronary Artery Bypass; Patient Satisfaction