Assessment of clients 'satisfaction with primary health care services in Basra City, South of Iraq 2012

Client satisfaction has been defined as the degree of congruency between a client’s expectation of ideal care and his/her perception of the real care receive. In Iraq, there has been a recent concern at the Ministry of Health (MOH) about improving the quality of Primary Health Care (PHC) services being considered the first health “gate” for the community. This study aimed to assess the level of clients’ satisfaction with PHC services in Basra, Iraq, 2012. A cross-sectional study was performed on 12 randomly selected PHC centers from the total eight PHC districts at Basra Health Directorate, where 1200 clients aged 18 years and above were selected systematically. Data was collected via a direct interview with clients using an Arabic language questionnaire. The satisfaction was rated at a scale of 1-5 points, and the data was analyzed using c.  The results of the current study revealed that the overall clients’ satisfaction was 90.8%. The highest score for clients’ satisfaction was for nurses’ staff domain of PHC services (91.9%), and the lowest was for waiting for the domain (74.5%). Old age, females, retired and illiterate clients showed significantly the highest overall satisfaction. Clients reported their main dissatisfaction for the availability of the medicines item (53.4%) and the waiting time to see medical staff item (59%). The present study concluded that overall clients’ satisfaction was relatively high, and socio-demographic characteristics played major roles in deciding the extent of clients’ satisfaction.