Patients' perspective of domains of health care quality: a study of specialist outpatients' clinics of a Teaching Hospital in North Central Nigeria

Abstract

Background: Clinic attendance in Nigerian Teaching Hospitals has often being associated with lots of frustration. Considering the
fact that each specialist clinic attends to patients with particular types of medical conditions, we hypothesized that the level of patient
satisfaction with care quality would be different across the various clinics. This study assesses the level of patients' satisfaction with
the care quality across the main specialist outpatients' clinics of the University of Abuja Teaching Hospital, Gwagwalada - Abuja in
North Central Nigeria.
Methods: This was a descriptive cross sectional study conducted between September and October 2019. A multistage sampling
technique was used to select respondents and data was collected with the aid of SERVQUAL questionnaires. The data was analyzed
with the aid of SPSS 21.0 and statistical significance was set at a Pvalue 0.05.
Results: About 87% of respondents reported good satisfaction with the overall domains of care quality. The mean satisfaction score
was highest for Family Medicine clinic with respect to tangible and responsiveness domains of quality care (15.83±2.29 and
16.04±2.63 respectively) while Medical Outpatients clinic was rated highest for assurance, reliability, and empathy domains of
quality care (15.05±2.66, 18.00±3.86 and 19.39±3.65 respectively). The differences in mean satisfaction scores were statistically
significant for the tangible and assurance domains (p- value of 0.033 and 0.015 respectively). The surgically related clinics have lower
mean satisfaction scores in all the domains of quality care.
Conclusions: The results of our study were surprisingly encouraging, showing that the respondents were satisfied with the care
quality. Significant efforts should however be made to improve the quality of care provided at the surgically related Clinics.

Keywords: Patients satisfaction, domains, care quality, outpatient clinics, SERVIQUAL.