Patient Experience Journal (Aug 2020)
An extensive review of patient satisfaction with healthcare services in Bangladesh
Abstract
Patient satisfaction is a useful measure for providing quality indicators in healthcare services. Assessing patients’ satisfaction is important since it often helps, in absence of healthcare service quality indicators, to determine the quality of health-care delivery and health system responsiveness. Higher levels of patient satisfaction indicate higher levels of patient empowerment, commitment to care and compliance to recommended management–all of which results in better health outcomes. Concern over the quality of healthcare services in Bangladesh has resulted in a loss of faith in healthcare providers, low utilization of public health facilities, and increased outflows of patients from Bangladesh to hospitals abroad. The main barriers to accessing health services are inadequate services and poor quality of existing facilities, shortage of medical supplies, the busyness of doctors due to high patient load, long travel distance to facilities, and long waiting times once facilities were reached, very short consultation time, lack of empathy of the health professionals, their generally callous and casual attitude, aggressive pursuit of monetary gains, poor levels of competence and, occasionally, disregard for the suffering that patients endure without being able to voice their concerns—all of these service failures are frequently reported in the print media. Such failures can play a powerful role in shaping patients' negative attitudes and dissatisfaction with healthcare service providers and healthcare itself. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare plans and implements the public healthcare delivery through various healthcare infrastructure, from national to the community level. Experience Framework This article is associated with the Policy & Measurement lens of The Beryl Institute Experience Framework. (http://bit.ly/ExperienceFramework) Access other PXJ articles related to this lens. Access other resources related to this lens.
