Measuring patients' expectations and requests.

Area of Science:

• Health Services Research
• Patient Experience
• Medical Sociology

Background:

• Patients often present with worries about symptom causes, specific care expectations, and demands for time, information, and services.
• Understanding these patient concerns, expectations, and requests is vital for clinicians, health policymakers, and researchers.
• Disagreement on methods for identifying, monitoring, and classifying these patient phenomena has hindered progress.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review the conceptual links between patient expectations, requests, and satisfaction with care.
• To survey current methods for measuring patient expectations and requests.
• To highlight recent empirical findings on patient expectations.

Main Methods:

• Literature review of conceptual relationships.
• Survey of contemporary measurement approaches for patient expectations and requests.
• Synthesis of recent empirical findings.

Main Results:

• Patient expectations are diverse and can be reliably measured.
• Patient expectations have significant potential clinical consequences.
• Existing literature supports the importance of patient expectations in healthcare.

Conclusions:

• Eliciting, evaluating, and understanding patient expectations is a critical task for healthcare professionals and policymakers.
• Addressing patient expectations can lead to improved care and satisfaction.
• Further research and standardized methods are needed to fully integrate patient expectations into clinical practice.