Understanding patient satisfaction in a hospital emergency department

The field of health marketing has been witnessing the growing importance of concerns for patient satisfaction and assessment of health care services. This paper reports a prospective study which has been conducted in order to understand satisfaction in a hospital emergency department (ED). A questionnaire was applied to a sample of patients leaving the emergency department of a public hospital and correlation analysis is used to assess the proposed hypotheses.Results show that satisfaction rates with the service as a whole are lower than satisfaction with the core health service. Patients consider “technical quality of health care”, “interpersonal behaviour”, and “waiting time” as the most important dimensions of service. Moreover, the variable “waiting time” is inversely associated to the ED patients’ satisfaction and “interpersonal behaviour” and “communication between clinicians and patients” influence positively patient satisfaction. These results contribute to a clearer view of which dimensions impact patients’ satisfaction thus contributing to understand how to improve healthcare services in EDs. © 2014, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.