Patient satisfaction with health care providers in South Africa: the influences of race and socioeconomic status
Open Access
- 28 June 2005
- journal article
- Published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in International Journal for Quality in Health Care
- Vol. 17 (6), 473-477
- https://doi.org/10.1093/intqhc/mzi062
Abstract
Objectives. The first democratic government elected in South Africa in 1994 inherited huge inequalities in health status and health provision across all sections of the population. This study set out to assess, 4 years later, the influence of race and socioeconomic status (SES) on perceived quality of care from health care providers. Design. A 1998 countrywide survey of 3820 households assessed many aspects of health care delivery, including levels of satisfaction with health care providers among different segments of South African society. Results. Fifty-one percent (n = 1953) of the respondents had attended a primary care facility in the year preceding the interview and were retained in the analysis. Both race and SES were significant predictors of levels of satisfaction with the services of the health care provider, after adjusting for gender, age, and type of facility visited. White and high SES respondents were about 1.5 times more likely to report excellent service compared with Black and low SES respondents, respectively. Conclusion. In South Africa, race and SES are not synonymous and can no longer be considered reliable proxy indicators of one another. Each has distinct and significant but different degrees of association with client satisfaction. Any assessment of equity-driven health policy in South Africa should consider the impacts of both race and SES on client satisfaction as one of the indicators of success.Keywords
This publication has 16 references indexed in Scilit:
- Are racial disparities in health conditional on socioeconomic status?Social Science & Medicine, 2005
- Race/ethnicity and patient satisfactionJournal of General Internal Medicine, 2004
- Patient-Centered Communication, Ratings of Care, and Concordance of Patient and Physician RaceAnnals of Internal Medicine, 2003
- Patient–Physician Relationships and Racial Disparities in the Quality of Health CareAmerican Journal of Public Health, 2003
- Do Health Care Ratings Differ by Race or Ethnicity?The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Safety, 2003
- The Structuring of Ethnic Inequalities in Health: Economic Position, Racial Discrimination, and RacismAmerican Journal of Public Health, 2003
- Putting equity in health back onto the social policy agenda: experience from South AfricaSocial Science & Medicine (1982), 2002
- Equitable access to cancer servicesCancer, 1999
- Quality assessment in health.BMJ, 1984
- Consumer Assessments of the Quality of Medical CareMedical Care, 1974