Introduction: Patient satisfaction is a good performance indicator for measuring the quality of health care delivered by hospitals. Satisfaction is understood to be the positive difference between users' perceptions of their experience at the moment of discharge and their expectations at the moment of admission.
Objective: To evaluate the expectations and the perceived quality of care in cataract surgery patients attending Hospital Clinic (HC).
Method: A two-stage descriptive study carried out at the HC in Barcelona, Spain. The target population consisted of patients operated on for cataracts during the 1996 calendar year. Two study groups were established: Group I, patients attending outpatient service before admission; and Group II, patients attending outpatient service after surgery. After informed consent was obtained, the patients were directly interviewed by three researchers especially trained for that purpose. The questionnaire included demographic variables and 31 questions related to expectations, all to be answered by means of a 7 points Likert's visual scale. All statistical calculations were performed using the SPSS program for Microsoft Windows.
Results: A total of 148 interviews were performed: 80 (54.1%) in Group I and 68 (45.9%) in Group II. The mean age was 64.2 +/- 11.6 years. The difference between scores at admission and at discharge was nearly significant (p = 0.064) for the "information" component.
Conclusions: The study of several fields where the patient's expectations are higher or lower contributes to prioritizing efforts to improve quality. There is a need for a frequent review and update of any patient satisfaction evaluation tools that are used.