Patient expectations and attitudes about waiting time in the waiting room at rural hospital: an assessment and potential intervention

Abstract

Patient satisfaction is an attitude about the care that was received that is stored in memory for later use and may result in cognitive, affective, or behavioral change. Attitudes are influenced by patient expectations for care. According to the expectation disconfirmation paradigm, when patient expectations for care are not met, dissatisfaction with the service may be a result. Informal conversation indicates that patients are willing to take their business elsewhere when they are not satisfied with the service. Therefore, it is the responsibility of a health care organization to monitor patient expectations. The results of a patient expectation survey conducted at a rural hospital indicate that patients expect to wait eleven minutes before being invited into the examination room, and believe that a twenty-four minute wait time is too long. Patients also showed a preference for waiting in the waiting room as opposed to waiting in the exam room. The results of a Pearson product-moment correlation indicate that, in this instance, the number of patients in the waiting room does not influence patient expectations. A potential intervention is to modify patient expectation when they arrive for their appointment. The results of an analogue experiment conducted at UW-Stout do not support the hypothesis that modifying participant expectations affect mean satisfaction with the experiment when the wait time is five minutes and under, neither the explanation nor the perceived wait time significantly predicted satisfaction.