Patients' views on quality of care: age effects and identification of patient profiles

Age differences among physically ill inpatients, regarding their evaluation of the subjective importance of various care conditions, as well as their actual evaluations of these conditions, were explored. Subjective importance ratings were found to be unrelated to age. Patients' perceptions of the care they actually received indicated increasingly more positive evaluations with increasing age. Profiles of more and less satisfied patients were obtained using cluster analysis. Lowest satisfaction was reported by younger and well-educated women with a lower sense of coherence (as measured by Antonovsky's (1987) version of the Sense of Coherence Questionnaire) who stayed for a short period of time in hospital. It was concluded that caregivers need to focus on individual patient characteristics when looking at quality of care from a patient perspective. Generalizations based on age alone tend to be misleading.