Docs Are Rude, Patients Say

There's a lot of attention being paid nowadays to patient satisfaction scores, although the jury is still out on whether they're a good yardstick for healthcare quality.

So what do patients complain about when they're not being surveyed?

A group of researchers in Turkey decided to study complaints at one university hospital over 4 years. According to their analysis, in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, the hospital admitted about 2 million patients, and had about 500 complaints, for a rate of .22 per 1,000 visits. The findings:

"One hundred fifty-three (33.8%) complaints were made about physicians, and most of these (20.4%) were related to poor attitude of the staff (Table 2). Rudeness and an apparent lack of sympathy for ill patients together with an 'off-hand', 'flippant,' 'arrogant' and 'dismissive manner' were the main complaints levelled at staff by patients and relatives. In addition, most complaints (31.6%, n=143) were made between June 1, 2008 and May 31, 2009 (Table 3), and occurred on a Monday (Table 4)."

That's right, a third of the complaints were about doctors, mostly for rudeness.

This is just one study, of one hospital in Turkey, and other studies have found much higher complaint rates, as high as eight per 1,000. The hospital studied has created a complaints department, which may explain a lot of the difference. So it's unclear how generalizable it is -- and whether doctors should do something different on Mondays.

Still, it's hard to argue with the conclusions:

"We believe that in most cases, patient complaints can be prevented if kindness, sympathy and thoughtfulness are shown."


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