Background and aims: Quality of care (QoC) has gained increased attention in IBD. A better QoC has, historically, been linked to improved treatment outcomes. Even so, factors of equal importance to patients may be quality of life (QoL), patient-physician communication and access to care. Recent surveys suggest that IBD care in Europe is suboptimal.
Methods: Patients were recruited from nine hospitals in the south-eastern and western part of Norway as a part of an observational, multicenter study In addition to clinical and socio-demographic factors; a purposely designed 26 item questionnaire was used to quantify aspects related to IBD care, including QoC. Moreover, the Fatigue Questionnaire (FQ) was used to investigate fatigue.
Results: In total, 411 patients were included. Of these, 231 were diagnosed with CD and 180 with UC. Furthermore, 86.1% (354/411) were satisfied with the quality of IBD follow-up and only 4.1% (17/411) were dissatisfied. Most dissatisfaction was related to: lack of focus on personal relations (18.2%), HRQoL (15.1%), general practitioner knowledge of IBD (13.9%), ability to talk about important topics (7.8%), and hospital discharge communication (9.4%). Higher age and longer disease duration was associated with improved QoC scores in both UC and CD. Fatigue was associated with decreased QoC scores in both diagnoses.
Conclusions: Patients are satisfied with quality of care in IBD. However, communication seems to be an important area of improvement - not only related to patient-physician communication, but also to transitional communication between different health-care levels.
Keywords: Inflammatory bowel disease; patient centredness; quality of care.