To recommend the local primary health-care centre or not: what importance do patients attach to initial contact quality, staff continuity and responsive staff encounters?

OBJECTIVE

This study aims to examine the circumstances associated with patients' tendencies to recommend a primary care centre, based on four hypotheses, the initial contact's quality, care relationship continuity, treatment encounter responsiveness and whether the significance of encounter responsiveness differs depending on whether the patient has been seeing a nurse or physician.

DESIGN

The study is based on the patient' self-reported responses, retrieved from the Swedish National Patient Survey. The design is cross-sectional, and data were analysed using a binary logistic regression.

SETTING

Data were collected from three primary healthcare centres in the region of Västra Götaland, Sweden.

PARTICIPANTS

A total of 362 patients (62% females) having visited any of three publicly run healthcare centres in September 2010 constitute the analytical sample. Participants were fairly evenly distributed across all age groups.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES

Recommendation was captured by patients' binary responses to the question: Would you recommend the visited primary healthcare centre?

RESULTS

The hypotheses involving initial contact quality, care relationship continuity and treatment encounter responsiveness were supported by the analyses. The latter was strongly associated with patient tendency to recommend the primary healthcare centre. However, the profession (nurse or physician) involved in the treatment encounter made no difference for the predictive significance of encounter responsiveness for a patient's tendency to recommend the healthcare centre.

CONCLUSIONS

Striving for stable and responsive patient/staff relationships and an open approach towards patients are potentially successful strategies for primary healthcare centres seeking to attract new patients and maintain current ones.