Increasing patients' satisfaction with communications.

This paper reports a successful experimental attempt to increase satisfaction with communications amongst general medical patients. A group of patients who received extra interviews designed to increase their understanding of what they had been told about their illnesses showed significantly greater satisfaction than patients treated in the usual manner, and patients who received extra placebo interviews about their hospital stay. Changes in satisfaction with communications over the period following discharge from hospital are also described and possible reasons for them are discussed.

RCT Entities:   Population Interventions Outcomes