Perceived quality and patient satisfaction from a day surgery clinic in Greece

Objectives: To explore perceived quality and patient satisfaction from a Day Surgery clinical setting of a major Oncological Public Hospital in the Greece.

Methods: It is a prospective study including all patients admitted for breast diseases from January to May of 2015 in the Day Surgery unit of a major Oncology Public hospital in Athens, Greece who were willing to answer specially designed questionnaires on perceived quality of primary care and satisfaction with provided care. The sample consisted of 105 patients with breast disease, aged 46.2 ± 13.1 years. The questionnaires used were Global Scales, the Expectations-Perceived Quality-Satisfaction with Primary Care Services Scale (E-PQ-SCSS), the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) and the 12-Item Short Form Survey (SF-12). All questionnaires are validated in the Greek population. Analysis was performed with the statistical package SPSS v.21.

Results: Most of the cases were benign (74.7%). Overall, 25.7% of the patients underwent the minimally invasive procedure of stereotactic biopsy: 19% Mammotome and 6.7% Breast Lesion Excision System (BLES). Patients were very satisfied from the physicians (82%) and nurses (86.7%) and rated as excellent the quality of services in Day Care Units (DCU) (8.7). Patients with minimally invasive procedures reported significantly greater satisfaction for the time dedicated by the nurses compared to the time dedicated by physicians (4.9 ± 0.2 versus 4.5 ± 0.7). Patients who underwent surgery reported significantly less activity compared to patients with minimally invasive procedures (1.6 ± 0.4 versus 1.9 ± 0.3). Waiting time for admission had as strong negative correlation with satisfaction from the administrators (r=0.775) and therapeutic intervention (r=0.653). For patients with malignancy scheduled admission punctuality was significantly very important compared to patients with benign diseases (4.9 ± 0.3 versus 4.3 ± 0.7).

Conclusion: The quality of services in the Day Surgery setting is very high resulting in its approval by the patients.