A Study On Status And Influences On Outpatient’s Satisfaction With Life In Some Hospitals Of Shanghai

It was widely accepted that patient’s life satisfaction was a multi-attribute summarizing response resulted from patient’s post-treatment cognitive and affective evaluation of medical service delivery. So Improving patient’s’life satisfaction and his/her health service quality, enhancing patient satisfaction and patient trust is of great significance. But up till now the influences of patient’s satisfaction with medical service delivery, perceptions of medical service, and trust in health delivery system on patient’s life satisfaction haven’t been studied under a systematic and comprehensive framework, and then their relative importance in influencing patient’s life satisfaction hasn’t been made clear, most importantly, differences of their relative importance in influencing patient’s life satisfaction among different kinds of hospitals haven’t been studied before in our health reform practice.Based on the literature research, we conducted a study adopting the two-stage probability proportional to size (PPS) systematic sampling technique to select a sample of 1,397 outpatients from various kinds of hospitals in Shanghai. This study was set up to analyze the status of patient’s life satisfaction and test whether and to what extent patient’s satisfaction with medical service delivery/patient’s perceptions of various major aspects of health quality/various major aspects of patient’s trust in health delivery system influenced patient’s life satisfaction in China’s health delivery system/in various kinds of hospitals.The study’s results were as follows:Patient’s overall satisfaction with medical service delivery had very significant positive influence on her/his life satisfaction in China’s health delivery system,1-point increase in patient’s overall satisfaction with medical service delivery would even lead to 2.651-point increase in patient’s life satisfaction.Among patient’s perceptions of various major aspects of health quality, patient’s perception of interpersonal quality had the largest positive influences on her/his life satisfaction, and the positive influences of patient’s perception of technical quality and perception of administrative quality on her/his life satisfaction were in the medium level, while patient’s perception of technical quality had the smallest positive influence on her/his life satisfaction.Among various major aspects of patient’s trust in health delivery system, patient’s responsiveness trust, technical competence trust, benevolence trust, care quality trust, communication skill trust had significant positive influences on her/his life satisfaction, and patient’s responsiveness trust had the largest positive influences on her/his life satisfaction, and benevolence trust, technical competence trust and communication skill trust were in the medium level, while only patient’s global trust had no significant influence on her/his life satisfaction.Patient’s overall satisfaction with medical service delivery had very significant positive influence on her/his life satisfaction in all kinds of public hospitals, and the positive influence of patient’s overall satisfaction with medical service delivery on patient’s life satisfaction in high level public hospital was usually larger than that in low level public hospital, but in private hospital patient’s overall satisfaction with medical service delivery had no significant influence on her/his life satisfaction.Patient’s perception of interpersonal quality, perception of technical quality, perception of environment quality and administrative quality had significant positive influences on her/his life satisfaction in all kinds of public hospitals. The positive influences of patient’s perception of technical quality, perception of environment quality and administrative quality on patient’s life satisfaction in low level public hospital were usually larger than those in high level public hospital, while the positive influences of perception of interpersonal quality on patient’s life satisfaction in high level public hospital were usually larger than those in low level public hospital. In private hospital only patient’s perception of technical quality, perception of administrative quality had significant positive influences on patient’s life satisfaction, patient’s responsiveness trust, technical competence trust, care quality trust and communication skill trust all had significant positive influences on her/his life satisfaction in all kinds of hospitals, while patient’s global trust had no significant influence on her/his life satisfaction in any kind of hospital.The positive influences of patient’s benevolence trust and communication skill trust on patient’s life satisfaction in high level public hospital were usually larger than those in low level public hospital, while the positive influence of responsiveness trust, level public hospital was usually larger than that in high level public hospital.It was founded that patient’s satisfaction with medical service delivery/patient’s perceptions of various major aspects of health quality/various major aspects of patient’s trust in health delivery system had influences on patient’s life satisfaction which varied in various kinds of hospitals. Some suggestion was given to both practitioners in various kinds of hospitals and regulators in various regulatory organizations for different effective ways to promote patient’s life satisfaction through promoting corresponding key influencing factors in various kinds of hospitals, which may be useful to better the relationship between the physician and the patient, improve the quality of medical care and advance our health system reform in China.