Patient Experience and Satisfaction Assessment in Healthcare Quality

Patient experience and satisfaction assessment has emerged as a cornerstone of healthcare quality evaluation, reflecting both the interpersonal and organisational dimensions of care delivery. Patient experience encompasses the objective events and interactions that individuals encounter—from appointment scheduling and wait times to communication with clinicians—while patient satisfaction captures subjective evaluations of whether expectations have been met. Together, these measures inform quality improvement, support accountability and guide resource allocation. A variety of instruments, including structured surveys and qualitative narratives, have been developed and tested for reliability and validity. Challenges remain in balancing psychometric rigour with practicality, in accounting for cultural and sociodemographic influences on responses, and in ensuring that data drive tangible improvements in care. Person-centred care, where patients are treated with dignity, respect and active engagement in decision-making, is both an ethical imperative and a predictor of better clinical outcomes. At a global level, robust assessment of patient experience and satisfaction underpins efforts to achieve universal health coverage, to reduce inequities and to foster health systems that respond to the needs and preferences of the populations they serve.

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Patient Experience and Satisfaction Assessment in Healthcare Quality publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in patient experience and satisfaction assessment in healthcare quality across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Patient experience: The objective sequence of events and interactions that patients undergo throughout their healthcare journey, including logistical and interpersonal elements.

Patient satisfaction: The subjective appraisal by patients of whether the care received meets or exceeds their expectations, often measured via surveys.

Person-centred care: An approach that respects patients’ values and preferences, involving them as active partners in decision-making about their health.

Psychometric validity: The extent to which a measurement instrument accurately and reliably captures the constructs it is intended to assess.

Bibliometric analysis: A quantitative method for evaluating research publications and citations to identify influential works, authors and thematic trends.

References

1. Physician-Peer Relationships and Patient Experiences With Specialist Care. JAMA Internal Medicine (2023).
2. When the patient is the expert: measuring patient experience and satisfaction with care. Bulletin of the World Health Organization (2019).
3. Instruments to measure patient experience of healthcare quality in hospitals: a systematic review. Systematic Reviews (2015).
4. Patient Satisfaction with Healthcare Services and the Techniques Used for its Assessment: A Systematic Literature Review and a Bibliometric Analysis. Healthcare (2023).