SMS and take delivery system: a study on patients’ awareness and satisfaction at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Kota Kinabalu

Introduction: The ‘SMS and Take’ delivery system was started in August 2008 by Queen Elizabeth Hospital’s Pharmacy Department, to enhance the drug delivery system through the use of technology and telecommunications advance to cut down waiting time at the out-patient department for patients with repeated prescriptions. Objective: The objective of this study was to assess the efficiency and the level of patient satisfaction of ‘SMS and Take’ delivery system at Pharmacy Department, Hospital Queen Elizebeth. Methodology: The questionnaires entitled “Borang Soal Selidik Pesakit Tentang Perkhidmatan ‘SMS dan Ambil”, and the SMS and Take service files were used for collecting data in this study. Data collected were analyzed and presented according to the parts in the questionnaires. Results: There were 101 participants of this study. 58 respondents (57.4%) claim to be aware of the ‘SMS and Take’ service while 42 respondents (41.6%) are subscribers of the stated service. Out of these 42 subscribers a majority of respondents claim to have heard of the service through advertisement by poster or leaflet, with 20 respondents (34.5%) claiming to know from posters and 22 respondents (37.9%) knowing from leaflets. This is not surprising as the poster and leaflets were placed at strategic spots easy for patients to recognize. 33 subscriber respondents claim to use the service every time they wanted to retrieve their repeated medication while nine do not use the service so. The most popular reason for non-use or non-compliance of service is that the respondent forgot that they had subscribed to the service. However, almost all (97.6%) of the respondents agreed that the ‘SMS and Take’ service encouraged them to retrieve their repeated medication. The ‘SMS and Take’ service has been perceived as ‘good’ or ‘satisfying’ in all aspects, with 61.9% of respondents say that the service is very useful in terms of repeated medication retrieval, 52.4% of respondents stated that they are satisfied with the staff in charge of the service and 90.5% claimed that the service is really saving their time for medication retrieval. Overall, 52.4% says the service is satisfying while 45.2% says that the service is very satisfying. Discussion and conclusion: Results obtained from this study suggested that satisfaction level for the ‘SMS and Take’ service is high. Only a small percentages stated that they have nothing to say about the service in terms of satisfaction level meanwhile, patients who are currently not subscribing the stated service show a great deal of interest towards the service, with various reasons. This indicates that the ‘SMS and Take’ service met the satisfactory level of the subscribers and can be considered as a quality service although it is still under used at Hospital Queen Elizabeth.