The image of health services and family doctors in Portugal
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32385/rpmgf.v21i2.10123Keywords:
Health Care Quality, Client Satisfaction, Primary Care, General Practice, Family MedicineAbstract
In many health systems, quality is seen just as the professional quality or management quality and not as quality from the client perspective. In 1997, Portuguese Ministry of Health published and distributed the Letter of the rights and duties of the patients, which contained six duties and twelve rights. In the latest right, «Suggestions and complaints», the patient is entitled, for itself or for representative organizations, to present suggestions and complaints. Starting from 1999, with the publication of the Law no. 135/99 of the Presidency of Council of Ministers, every public health service patient started to have availability of these two audition and participation mechanisms: the box of suggestions and opinions and the book of complaints. Recent tendencies are for carrying out patient satisfaction studies to allow documenting their experiences within the services and with health care. Patient satisfaction usually maintains strong empiric relationships with several health care process indicators and results. In Portugal those surveys have demonstrated that patients are happy with their family doctors and unsatisfied with the organization, especially with waiting timesDownloads
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