Feedback intervention to doctors improves patient satisfaction among outpatients in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China.

OBJECTIVES: The doctor-patient relationship (DPR) in China is known to be tense. We tested whether an intervention program providing individualized feedback to doctors by patients could improve patients' satisfaction in an outpatient setting.

STUDY DESIGN: A non-randomized controlled prepost intervention study in a tertiary hospital. Six surgery clinics were chosen as the intervention group and eight internal medicine clinics as the control group.

METHODS: Before the program started, patients attending each group of clinics were asked to fill in the Short-Form Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire (PSQ-18). In the experimental period, patients attending the intervention clinics were requested to rate their perception of the doctor's quality of care in various domains on an 8-question feedback card immediately after exiting from the examination room and to drop the completed card into the feedback box for the particular doctor. The cards were then collected by the doctor confidentially at the end of each day. There was no feedback in the control clinics. After the experimental period ended, the doctors in both groups of clinics were reassessed by a new series of patients using PSQ-18. The PSQ-18 scores were compared within the same group of clinics over time, and the changes in satisfaction score compared between intervention and control clinics.

RESULTS: There were 189 and 190 responders in the intervention group and 190 and 200 in the control group, before and after the intervention period, respectively. Scores in all domains increased significantly (P < 0.001) in the intervention group but not in the control group. Significant improvement in the patient satisfaction scores in the intervention clinics compared with the control clinics was confirmed by mixed-effects linear regression controlling for the effects of gender, age, marital status, education, and household income in the domains of general satisfaction, technical quality, communication, and accessibility and convenience.

CONCLUSIONS: Timely feedback to doctors of patients' perception of quality of care received can improve outpatient satisfaction in a Chinese hospital.