To recommend the local primary health-care centre or not : What importance do patients attach to initial contact quality, staff continuity and responsive staff encounters?

• Objective: This study aims to examine the circumstances associated with patients’ tendencies to recommend a primary care centre, based on four hypotheses, the initial contact’s quality, care relationship continuity, treatment encounter responsiveness and whether the significance of encounter responsiveness differs depending on whether the patient has been seeing a nurse or physician. Design: The study is based on the patient’ self-reported responses, retrieved from the Swedish National Patient Survey. The design is cross-sectional, and data were analysed using a binary logistic regression. Setting: Data were collected from three primary healthcare centres in the region of Västra Götaland, Sweden. Participants: A total of 362 patients (62% females) having visited any of three publicly run healthcare centres in September 2010 constitute the analytical sample. Participants were fairly evenly distributed across all age groups. Main Outcome Measures: Recommendation was captured by patients’ binary responses to the question: Would you recommend the visited primary healthcare centre? Results: The hypotheses involving initial contact quality, care relationship continuity and treatment encounter responsiveness were supported by the analyses. The latter was strongly associated with patient tendency to recommend the primary healthcare centre. However, the profession (nurse or physician) involved in the treatment encounter made no difference for the predictive significance of encounter responsiveness for a patient’s tendency to recommend the healthcare centre. Conclusions: Striving for stable and responsive patient/staff relationships and an open approach towards patients are potentially successful strategies for primary healthcare centres seeking to attract new patients and maintain current ones. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved)(journal abstract)

Ämnesord

MEDICIN OCH HÄLSOVETENSKAP  -- Hälsovetenskap -- Hälso- och sjukvårdsorganisation, hälsopolitik och hälsoekonomi (hsv//swe)

MEDICAL AND HEALTH SCIENCES  -- Health Sciences -- Health Care Service and Management, Health Policy and Services and Health Economy (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

surveys

general methodology

primary care/general practice

setting of care

Human

Male

Female

Childhood (birth-12 yrs)

Neonatal (birth-1 mo)

Infancy (2-23 mo)

Preschool Age (2-5 yrs)

School Age (6-12 yrs)

Adolescence (13-17 yrs)

Adulthood (18 yrs & older)

Young Adulthood (18-29 yrs)

Thirties (30-39 yrs)

Middle Age (40-64 yrs)

Aged (65 yrs & older)

Swedish National Patient Survey

Empirical Study

Quantitative Study

Medical Patients

Nurses

Client Attitudes

Quality of Services

Quality of Care

Physicians

Primary Health Care

Health Care Delivery

article

Sweden

3370:Health & Mental Health Services

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