[Quality of health care services as perceived by the customers: issues of method or context?]

Customer satisfaction is considered an important indicator of the quality of care. Its definition as well as the identification of the variables which affect it, rise many cultural and methodological issues. In order to give a contribution to the debate on such topics, we compared the patients' satisfaction detected before and after the transferral of the San Salvatore Hospital of L'Aquila to new and functional structures. The comparison aimed at evaluating the methodological and cultural entailments involved in customers satisfaction surveys, which focus the improvements in terms of health care as well as variation of satisfaction. The presence of contradictory elements in the expression of the satisfaction referred to the technical and informative aspects, seems to indicate that patients can express an high satisfaction degree independently from the real professional and technical quality performed. Such evidences, that anyway must be interpreted according with the methodological cautions of a non validated questionnaire, should foster stronger efforts in promoting sanitary education of the customers, devoted to the specific rights involved, as well as in making use of rigorous methodologies to detect the phenomenon.