RESEARCH REPORT POSTER DISPLAY

PATIENT-SATISFACTION WITH PHYSIOTHERAPY. Eriksdotter A¹, Graver V², Andreassen G²; ¹Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and Department of Physiotherapy, Ullevaal University Hospital, Oslo, Norway. ²Department of Physiotherapy, Ullevaal University Hospital, Oslo, Norway

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study, carried out in an outpatient physiotherapy clinic at Ullevaal University Hospital, Norway, was to assess patients’satisfaction, predictors of satisfaction and to see if proffesionals in the department were able to predict areas referred to as problematic by the patients. RELEVANCE: Patient satisfaction is increasingly applied to monitor patient perception concerning quality of health care services. Patient satisfaction can be one indicator of the quality of care. PARTICIPANTS: One hundred sixty six patients with muscular skeletal disorders who had completed outpatient physiotherapy treatment (mean age 46.6 (SD13.2), 97 women, 66 men and three patients with unknown gender) were included. Twenty two per cent of the patients did not have the Scandinavian languages as their mother tongue. In addition, 20 proffesionals in the department (doctors and physiotherapists) were included in the survey. METHODS: A questionnaire developed by the authors was sent to 277 patients and 30 proffesionals. All participants answered anonymously. The proffesionals were asked to answer in accordance with what they thought patients would answer. The questionnaire consisted of three global effect variables and twenty one questions measuring various aspects of satisfaction with physiotherapy. Age, gender and language were registered. ANALYSIS: The significance of associations between the global questions and the different other items were investigated by means of univarieted and multivariated regression analyses, Chi-square test and Kruskall-Wallis test. Kruskall-Wallis and Chi-square tests were performed to determine the differences between the answers of the patients and the proffesionals. RESULTS: A total of 166 (60.4%) questionnaries were returned from the 277 patients and 20 (66.7%) from the 30 professionals. The majority of the patients where satisfied with the treatment and services and wanted to recommend the physiotherapy outpatient clinic (p < 0.0001), although a large number of patients reported that their condition had not improved (p < 0.0001). Environmental factors (premises, accessibility and cleaning) were identified as areas with great potential for improvement but they were not strongly correlated to overall satisfaction. Age and gender had little influence on the results. Patients not having a Scandinavian language as their mother tongue were less satisfied with the treatment on an overall basis (p = 0.01). There were significant diffrences between the anserwers of the proffesionals and the patients in two-third of the questions. CONCLUSIONS: Patient satisfaction was highly associeted with proffesional skills, information and communication. Environmental factors had less impact on the results. The proffesionals had great difficulty predicting the patients opinions. Non-Scandinavian language was a strong predictor of dissatisfaction. In order to give minority groups of patients’relevant treatment and service, we are doing another follow up study. IMPLICATIONS: Earlier studies have shown that qualitative studies are needed to study patients’ perspective. Patient’s perspective and expectaions are of importance for how they perceive satisfaction. In our survey we have shown that to know what is of importance to the patients you have to ask them. It is also important to focus on measurements of dissatisfaction, this can be a step forward in improving patient satisfaction and thereby the quality of treatment and services. KEYWORDS: physiotherapy, patient-satisfaction and questionnarie. FUNDING ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: No external founding. CONTACT: ansd@uus.no