Abstract:
Somdejphraphuthalertla Hospital is a secondary care hospital that plans to go to hospital accreditation but has yet to assess its customer’s satisfactions and needs. The goal of this cross-sectional descriptive research was to assess the quality of services and the level of satisfactions, and to determine the association between these two variables. The target population was all patients who were Thai citizen and above 18 years old visited the outpatient department at General Medicine section during February 25 to March 31, 2013. A stratified sampling scheme was used to identify 400 study participants from outpatient department in General Medicine section. A self-administered questionnaire was used among all participants. The study found that the customers at Somdejphraphuthalertla Hospital were tend to be elderly population, ages between 56 - 75 years old (36.0%), 70.2% of the respondents were female, 64.5% were married, and 30.5% reported their occupation as employee in private section. The highest level of education was primary school at 54.0%. The highest level of income was reported to be below 10,000 baht per month. The level of customers’ satisfaction toward services in overall was found to be at very high at 94.2% and 99.0% of the respondents would return to use the service in the future. The finding from this study suggested that this hospital should be a good model for other public hospital. In the future, quality of care should be measured from an inclusive perspective that includes those of the healthcare providers and staffs, the hospital board committee and their customers. Also, the study should consider all departments in order to be able to compare quality of services for improvement in the future.
