Assessment of patients’ satisfaction through dietary services in government and private hospitals in India

Abstract

Consumer satisfaction is a keyfeaturein delineating the quality of offered services.Similarly, in hospitals, satisfaction of patientswith the dietary services is considered as one of theparameters of estimation of quality of hospitals’ food services. Food provided in the hospital must be nutritious and must qualify the clinical needs of patients along with fulfilling their dietary expectations. A satisfied patients responds to the clinical treatment in a much better way than discontented. Thus, to improve the health care system, in parallel to the development of other sectors, considering the patient satisfactionas benchmark of dietary service is seen as a pivotal factor.Such studied are essential for improvement in hospital service quality and in India relatively lesser research is done in this field. In the present study we aimed to examine the factors that could influence the dietary satisfaction of patients and could be used to amend the food services in hospital. We took qualitative and non-experimental approach where we used questionnaire as our data collection tool where we collected demographic profile of patients, their nutritional status along with the type of facilities they are availing.