[Interface between quality of health and patients' satisfaction]

Patients' satisfaction is an area of growing relevance in terms of health services assessment. The basis for this importance is of practical nature, which means that satisfied patients adhere better to professional orientations and treatments, and therefore it's possible to obtain more health gains. Nevertheless, the importance of this issue is also political and economic, as the high costs existing within actual health contexts require the institutions to demonstrate their efficiency and efficacy. One quality indicator is effectively patients' satisfaction, sometimes called users or even clients, in a pragmatic liaison with enterprise management. Nurses are one of the health professional groups with the most significant impact inpatient's satisfaction due to the amount of care they deliver. Besides we have to consider that the emergence of this issue in health field is recent and it results from the mutability of client's satisfaction concept in management context, where it's possible to achieve greater objectivity. In fact when we face the problem from the patient point of view, the assessment is made according to a different cognitive and emotional perspective, considering the inherent vulnerability that results from a change in health status.