Determinants of patient satisfaction: Lessons from large-scale inpatient interviews in Vietnam

Patient satisfaction, a healthcare recipient’s reaction to salient aspects of their service experience, has been considered an important metric of the overall quality of healthcare in both advanced and developing countries. Given the growing number of studies on patient satisfaction in developing and transitioning countries, publications using high-quality patient surveys in these countries remain scarce. This study examines factors associated with inpatient satisfaction levels using nationwide, large-scale interview data from 10,143 randomized and voluntary patients of 69 large and public hospitals in Vietnam during 2017-2018. We find that older patients, poor patients, female patients, patients with lower levels of education, patients not working for private enterprises (or foreign enterprises), and rural patients reported higher levels of overall satisfaction. Health insurance is found to have positive influence on overall patient satisfaction, primarily driven by limiting patient concerns about treatment costs, as well as increasing positive perceptions of hospital staff. We further find that patients who paid extra fees for their hospital admission expressed higher scores for hospital living arrangements and medical staff, but were mostly dissatisfied with treatment costs. These findings have important policy implications for current policy makers in Vietnam as well as for other countries with limited healthcare resources and ongoing healthcare reforms.