School of Business, University of Skövde, Skövde, Sweden.
School of Technology and Society, Skövde, Sweden.
J Health Organ Manag. 2021 Mar 22;35(9):85-100. doi: 10.1108/JHOM-09-2020-0357.
The purpose of the paper is to describe and analyze differences in patients' quality perceptions of private and public primary care centers in Sweden.
DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: The article explores the differences in quality perceptions between patients of public and private primary care centers based on data from a large patient survey in Sweden. The survey covers seven dimensions, and in this paper the measure Overall impression was used for the comparison. With more than 80,000 valid responses, the survey covers all primary care centers in Sweden which allowed for a detailed analysis of differences in quality perceptions among patients from the different categories of owners.
The article contributes with a detailed description of different types of private owners: not-for-profit and for profit, as well as corporate groups and independent care centers. The results show a higher quality perception for independent centers compared to both public and corporate groups.
RESEARCH LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONS: The small number of not-for-profit centers (21 out of 1,117 centers) does not allow for clear conclusions for this group. The results, however, indicate an even higher patient quality perception for not-for-profit centers. The study focus on describing differences in quality perceptions between the owner categories. Future research can contribute with explanations to why independent care centers receive higher patient satisfaction.
The results from the study have policy implications both in a Swedish as well as international perspective. The differentiation between different types of private owners made in this paper opens up for interesting discussions on privatization of healthcare and how it affects patient satisfaction.
ORIGINALITY/VALUE: The main contribution of the paper is the detailed comparison of different categories of private owners and the public owners.
本文旨在描述和分析瑞典私人和公共初级保健中心患者对医疗质量感知的差异。
设计/方法/途径：本文基于瑞典一项大型患者调查数据，探讨了公共和私人初级保健中心患者在质量感知方面的差异。该调查涵盖了七个维度，本文使用总体印象这一指标进行比较。该调查涵盖了瑞典所有的初级保健中心，有超过 8 万份有效回复，这使得能够对不同所有者类别患者的质量感知差异进行详细分析。
本文详细描述了不同类型的私人所有者：非营利性和营利性、以及企业集团和独立护理中心。结果表明，与公共和企业集团相比，独立中心的质量感知更高。
研究局限性/影响：非营利性中心的数量较少（1117 个中心中的 21 个），因此无法对此类中心得出明确的结论。然而，结果表明，非营利性中心的患者质量感知更高。本研究重点描述了所有者类别之间的质量感知差异。未来的研究可以进一步解释为什么独立护理中心能获得更高的患者满意度。
本研究的结果在瑞典和国际范围内都具有政策意义。本文对不同类型的私人所有者进行的区分，为关于医疗保健私有化及其如何影响患者满意度的讨论提供了新的视角。
原创性/价值：本文的主要贡献是对不同类型的私人所有者和公共所有者进行了详细的比较。
