Elderly and Health Care services: the elements characterising the patient satisfaction

Recent transformations in the policies of the health system (crisis of the welfare state, administrative decentralization, corporatization, etc..) modified the traditional relationships between health services and citizens-patients. The supply of health services, in fact, is now increasingly constrained by the citizens-patients’ needs and their related opinion on satisfaction. Research on service quality and customer satisfaction become, then, a needful business tool in planning health care services. In this sense, especially in this context characterized by information asymmetry, health system priorities become quality, efficiency, care suitability and customised medical supply. The purpose of this paper is thus to identify which elements characterise citizens-patients satisfaction and how these elements are influenced by hard (medical competencies, continuity) or soft (relational, hospitality) factors. As methodology a structured equation modelling has been applied. As a result of a structured questionnaire - designed to assess satisfaction items and its antecedents on a 1 to 7 Likert scale - 450 cases resulted eligible to be submitted to the statistical analysis. This method, in fact, allowed us to study simultaneously the structure of the interconnections between observed explanatory variables, latent factors (summary of individual aspects of assessment) and overall degree of citizens-patients satisfaction. The output of this exploratory analysis underlined soft elements as the most statistically relevant factors explaining citizens-patients satisfaction compared to the hard ones.