Quality of care and patient satisfaction: a review of measuring instruments.

Surveying the literature on the assessment of quality of care from the patient's perspective, the concept has often been operationalized as patient satisfaction. Patient satisfaction has been a widely investigated subject in health care research, and dozens of measuring instruments were developed during the past decade. Quality of care from the patient's perspective, however, has been investigated only very recently, and only a few measuring instruments have explicitly been developed for the assessment of quality of care from the patient's perspective. The authors consider patient satisfaction as an indicator of quality of care from the patient's perspective. This review is concerned with the question of whether any reliable and valid instruments have been developed to measure quality of care from the patient's perspective.