Patient Satisfaction in a University Health Center: A Malaysian Study

Abstract

Student satisfaction surveys can be a very useful tool for a university health center if they are used appropriately. Our objective was to assess the level of satisfaction of 132 randomly selected master and PhD students with services provided at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) health center and to gather information regarding the capabilities of the health center information technology, the degree of user satisfaction and its anticipated impact on the satisfaction. The results showed that over 63% of students were unsatisfied and about 10% of them very unsatisfied. The un-satisfaction was generalized and included all services provided by the health center and was irrespective of patients’ demographic characteristics. Putting all the data together it appeared that the net benefit i.e. the patient satisfaction was not achieved. Patient satisfaction is reportedly a useful measure to provide a direct indicator of quality in healthcare, hence needs to be measured frequently so that a domesticated and localized healthcare plan could be developed. The importance of this study is that our student satisfaction survey results can be used by the university authorities to identify strengths and weaknesses of the services offered by the UTM health center and provide quality improvement initiatives and accreditation requirements.