Measuring patient satisfaction of the quality of health care: a study of hospitals in Turkey.

Patient satisfaction is an important measure of service quality in health care systems. Patients' perceptions about health care systems seem to have been largely ignored by health care managers in developing countries. The aim of this study is to develop a reliable and valid instrument to measure patient satisfaction in Turkey. A questionnaire was developed and a total of 1100 patients in 31 different hospitals were interviewed. Factor analysis was utilized to determine the factor structure. The instrument of the patient satisfaction developed in this study provides insights to the researches who study the improvement of patient satisfaction with service quality of hospitals, practitioners, and the decision makers.