Abstract
Background: Depressive disorders are severe diseases with important effects on mental and physical well-being. Besides a guideline-oriented therapy and a high remission, patient satisfaction is an important criterion for the evaluation of quality of care in psychiatry and psychotherapy. Although patient satisfaction is one of the most often used quality indicators, its importance and use for the evaluation of inpatient depression therapy is discussed critically. This paper analyses the use of the CSQ-8 as a differential instrument to evaluate patient satisfaction.
Method: A multicentre study was realised from October 2001 to April 2004 in 10 psychiatric hospitals. The correlation between sociodemographic data, clinical and therapy oriented criteria and patient satisfaction is tested with univariate and multivariate methods.
Results: Besides marital and occupational status clinical symptoms and length of treatment are important predictors of a better patient satisfaction. In multivariate analyses a positive relation between the patient estimated improvements (BDI) of symptoms (OR 3.8; p=0.005), the average treatment duration (OR 2.7; p=0.039) and the occupational status (OR 3.5; p=0.046) and patient satisfaction was shown.
Conclusions: The CSQ-8 for evaluating patient satisfaction regarding inpatient depression therapy is insufficient conditional on its minor capability for the differentiation of subgroups. In order to better use the CSQ-8 for clinical and research purposes more specification of the instrument regarding aspects of satisfaction and dissatisfaction is needed.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.