Customer Satisfaction and Quality Care Essay

What started out as a community hospital has grew over the past 50 years into a healthcare organization comprising of seven distinct units helping 300,000 people every year. Such development and growth has been motivated by one reason taking care of the people that call Houston County and nearby peoples home. Houston Medical Center is a typical hospital in Warner Robins, GA, and has 237 beds. The most recent statistics study reveals that 67,439 patients stopped at the hospital’s emergency room, there were 14,179 patients admitted to admissions 1,987 inpatient surgeries and 9,816 outpatient surgeries. While the additional facts of the quality care report the requirements of the hospital, physician, and customer, the patient’s demand to be heard is overcome by a measurement of satisfaction. Frequently, the information collected from the surveys is beneficial for the hospital to measure itself and its accomplishment in keeping a minimum standard of care and sustaining the customer’s needs. 33 Studies have shown that each patient who is dissatisfied will inform up to ten other people of this dissatisfaction (Sitzia & Wood 1997). For instance let’s say with the information given on the percentage of dissatisfaction of patients not being explained what the medicine is they are taking that patient could say that he was given the wrong medication because you have not told him the medication he is taking. I am quite sure this type of dissatisfaction could lead to a lawsuit. Three barriers that existed at Houston Medical Center were the time they had to wait to receive help, explanation of medicine not given before given to patient to take, and the rooms and bathrooms were not as clean as they should be. These three barriers could have a huge significance on the facility. These barriers I am sure impacted the customer satisfaction at Houston Medical Center. The barriers affected whether or not the patient would return to the center due to the facility not being clean, poor communication, and the wait time. All these factors would make a patient skeptical about returning to the center. One tool Houston Medical Center  could have used to study a process barrier related to customer-satisfaction would be the Pareto diagrams or charts. This tool could be used to monitor when the bathrooms were cleaned, patient arrival time and wait time, and also to record the medication given to the pati ent allowing the nurse to at the time of giving medication to explain what the medication is for. References Sitzia J, Wood N. Patient satisfaction: A review of issues and concepts. Social Science & Medicine. 1997; 45:1829–1843.