Seniors' perceptions of their medical care. Before admission to a geriatric rehabilitation program

To review older patients' perceptions of their medical care before hospital admission and to determine whether there are common perceptions family physicians should address after discharge.

Semistructured interviews with qualitative analysis.

Inpatient geriatric rehabilitation and assessment unit.

Community-living seniors admitted from home or transferred from acute care hospitals.

Consecutively admitted patients were interviewed within a week of admission. Participants were asked open-ended and Likert-type questions. Responses were analyzed to uncover recurrent themes and descriptive statistics.

Patients thought physicians' personalities and ability to communicate were important factors in their satisfaction with care received. Loyalty to a physician was an important theme and might have made patients minimize their concerns about care. Most patients were confident in being discharged back into the care of their family physicians.

Physicians' personalities and communication skills affected whether patients were satisfied with care. Older patients are loyal to their family physicians; they did not identify any issues for family physicians to address with them after discharge.