FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH OUTPATIENT SATISFACTION WITH HEALTH SERVICE AT DEGAHBUR HOSPITAL, SOMALI REGION, EASTERN ETHIOPIA

Abstract

Introduction Patient satisfaction surveys are essential in obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the patient‟s need and their opinion of the service received. It is a vital tool in evaluating the quality of healthcare delivery service in hospital. Patient satisfaction that constitutes an important dimension of quality care and patients‟ outcomes, complementing measures of institutional performance and clinical outcome have proven to be a valuable, relatively cheap and conventional way to assess the provision of quality care to patients. Objective: To assess the determinants of Outpatients‟ satisfaction with the health care services provided by Degahbur Hospital, Somali region from March 1 to 30, 2017. Methodology: Hospital based cross-sectional study was conducted from March 1 to 30, 2017. Systematic random sampling techniques were employed for the hospital Outpatients to get the sample size of 422 participants. A pre-structured questionnaire was used for data collection. Pre test of 30 patient selected outside the actual study area was conducted by the trained data collectors. Data was edited, coded, cleared and double entered using EPIDATA 3.02 and later exported to SPSS version 16 for analysis. Bivariate and multivariate analysis was conducted to check the associations between outcome variable and explanatory variables using binary logistic regression model. Result: out of the total 422 patient selected, 415 (98.3%) have responded to the interviews. From the 415 study participants 268 (64.4%) were satisfied the received services of the hospital. Quality of care (AOR= 0. 214, 95% CI (0.124, 0.357)), and (AOR = 0.304, 95% CI (0.104, 0.894)), waiting time (AOR = 0.239, 95% CI (0/127, 0.453)) and physicians service (AOR = 1.983 0.497, 95% CI (1.217, 3.233)) were independent predictors on patient satisfaction. Conclusion and Recommendation: the overall patient satisfaction (64.6%) computed from the different components of health care delivered at the outpatient of the hospital is lower as compared with national targets for public hospitals of Ethiopia. Hospital based regular Continuous quality improvement or clinical audit should be established.