A study on patients’ satisfaction about services in Outpatient Pharmacy Department of Hospital Sultan Abdul Halim

Among the entire pharmacy department, outpatient department is the largest and busiest pharmacy department in every hospital. Staffs in this department serve almost 1000 patients or more per day. Since they are vary in terms of patient’s background, the satisfaction of the patients towards the services provided might also varied. This study focuses on patients’ satisfaction towards outpatient services. We choose the participants from outpatient and patients among staffs in HSAH. This study was done at Hospital Sultan Abdul Halim, Sungai Petani and might be useful to improve accessibility and availability of staff in OPD in providing quality and efficient services for their patient. We conducted cross-sectional and observational study at Out Patient Department (OPD) of Hospital Sultan Abdul Halim, Sungai Petani. Then, one set of self-administered questionnaire was distributed randomly to the participants. The questionnaire was divided into two parts which consist of demographics and criteria that affect patient’s satisfaction. In this study, all the result from the questionnaire were distributed and gathered was analysed using software of Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS) version 23 and Microsoft Office Excel 2013 to complete the task. From our findings, not all visitors are fully satisfied with the services provided in out-patient pharmacy department but still most patients are satisfied and give a good feedback. Most of the participants voted average regarding the workflow and management of the services at the OPD. But for the staffs’ attitude and hospitality, majority of the participants were very satisfied. This research is to identify satisfaction of patients and staffs on the services provided and offered. By doing this research, we can identify what that makes the visitors not satisfied so that we can improve and do something better. Out-patient pharmacy department need to improve some of the criteria that did not get a good feedback to increase quality services in order to ensure all visitors are fully satisfied. From this research, we realized that person who in charge in management should take actions in order to increase patients’ satisfaction. With that, since waiting time always get negative feedback, we suggest that providing televisions and showing good movies can be a good idea too because this can make them feel that their time is not wasted without doing nothing. Besides that, OPD can also provide newspapers to the patients since from our findings, we found that reading materials is lacking and got not a very good feedback. Most of our visitors are elderlies and employed person so reading newspaper would be good for them.