Introduction: Patient satisfaction is one of the basic points in quality improvement systems. One of the services delivered to the patients is admission and its related aspects. The patient satisfaction from admission has a great impact on their satisfaction from the succeeding services they receive during the hospitalization. Patient satisfaction has different aspects including the personnel behavior, the waiting time for hospitalization, medical staff behavior, financial problems and hospitalization in the ward without problems. This study aimed to evaluate the above mentioned points in TUMS (Tehran University of Medical Sciences) hospitals.

Methods: To obtain data, patients were interviewed at the time of discherge. Hence, 1378 patients were interviewed during two consequent months. The data was analyzed using descriptive and analytic models employing version 10 of SPSS software.

Results: The findings are as follows: 66.6% didn't have any waiting time for hospitalization but 26.8% did. For 56.3% of patient, the length of time between coming into the emergency room and entering the proper ward wasn't long whereas 11.7% of patients weren't satisfied of the admission personnel behavior and 4.7% weren’t satisfied. The rate of contact satisfaction with admission's employees was 82.4%. 91.3% of patients have found the wards immediately after the admission. 80.5% of patients have said they would come back for treatment to the same facility again (if necessary) while 13.6% didn't show any tendency to the same place again. 78.7% of patients would recommend the center to their relatives while 14.1% wouldn’t do so. The patient overall satisfaction of the admission process was: 76% satisfied, 14.6% partially satisfied and 9.4% dissatisfied. There was a significant relation between educational level of the patients (p=0.007) the waiting time for hospitalization (p=0.004) and to have insurance notebook (p= 0.046) others as sex, age and marital status had no effect on the satisfaction rate.

Conclusion: We conclude that some hospitals have greater satisfaction rate than the others. It can be used benchmarking method to increase this rate. Other processes of admission should be improved including decrease of waiting admission time and increase of social insurance coverage.

Hakim Research Journal 2005 8(3) 31-37.