Exploratory Study on Patient Experience among the Older Adults in South Korea Público

Hong, Sungjae (Spring 2020)

Permanent URL: https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/pk02cb801?locale=es
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Abstract

The attitudes of patients toward healthcare services are now an essential part of discussions of healthcare quality. Patient experience is one of the concepts designed to quantify their attitudes, which focuses on the feedback on actual happening during healthcare services. This study focuses on patient experience among older adults who use health care services more and longer than young adults. Also, the study targets the South Korean population, which has a rapid aging trend and a unique national healthcare system. This study employed the dataset from the Healthcare Service Experience Survey (N=11,098) collected in 2017. There were three categories for patient experience: 1) communication with doctors/nurses, 2) waiting time, and 3) unmet health needs. Demographic characteristics, socioeconomic status, and health status were employed as potential indicators of patient experience. According to the result, older adults were more likely to have unmet health needs than younger adults (10.8% for age ≥ 65 vs. 2.2% for age < 30), while there was a small range of patient experience regarding communication and waiting time between the respondents. However, while socioeconomic status was the main indicator of patient experience regarding communication and waiting time among older adults, there was no significant association between the two among young and middle-aged adults. In contrast, while income level and health status were the main indicators of unmet health needs in all age groups, the power of each indicator differed by the age group. This study asks for policymakers to focus on older adults, especially the older adults with low socioeconomic status and chronic disease when designing healthcare policy for improving patient experience, as older adults are more likely to be underserved during a healthcare experience. Meanwhile, a small range of scales for patient experience regarding communication and waiting time between the respondents implies the need for new measures for patient experience, which can reveal more differences between the respondents. 

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Methods 11

Results 15

Discussion 18

References 24

Tables 30

Figures 39

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