Patient Satisfaction and Perception of Quality of Care in Outpatient Clinic in an Eye Specialist Hospital in Saudi Arabia

Aims: This study tries to evaluate patients’ satisfaction with a particular view of the specific perceptions of the quality of care in an outpatients department of tertiary care hospital provided by the doctors, nurses and receptionists, considering the waiting time as a separate factor of influence.

Study Design: This study was based on a questionnaire survey.

Methodology: This is a cross sectional study, whereby responses were collected from 300 patients who received treatment in the Eye Specialist Hospital in Saudi Arabia. Systematic sampling of patients was employed for selecting the samples. The data was collected by meeting the customers face to face. Every question was explained to respondents so that patient can understand the requirement of each factor considered. The data collected was analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics 21.

Results: The overall satisfaction level and the perception levels based on services provided by doctors, nurses and receptionists were observed to be significantly higher than the neutral perception level, at 1% level of significance. However, the perceptions of the patients regarding the waiting time for service was significantly lower than the neutral perception level, at 1% level of significance. The waiting time for consulting with the doctor was more than 30 minutes in about 70% of the cases. The study also reveals that the male patients and those having long standing health conditions perceive better satisfaction levels than others. However, other demographic factors such as age, education level, income and ethnic group are not significantly related to the overall satisfaction levels.