Hospital patient satisfaction: correlates, dimensionality, and determinants.

This paper investigates the correlates, dimensionality, and determinants of patient satisfaction in the hospital health care encounter. All of the individual hospital characteristics assessed were found to be significantly related to patient satisfaction. The findings suggest that patients evaluate hospital service quality along four distinct dimensions. The relative importance of these four factors in predicting overall satisfaction, in descending order, is: (1) physician/capabilities, (2) nurses/staff, (3) amenities, and (4) accessibility. In combination, these four factors explain 63 percent of overall patient satisfaction.