[Patients' satisfaction and perinatal network: a preliminary report]

The objective of this work was to determine the principal axes for measuring the satisfaction of women transferred within a perinatal network.

We began with two successive qualitative sociological approaches (18 semi-structured interviews of women and of couples in 2004 and 2006-2007) and one quantitative approach (questionnaire survey of 583 women hospitalized in 15 of the 16 maternity units in the Auvergne network during a two-week period in 2004).

The qualitative surveys show that the procedures at arrival at the new establishment and the feeling of consistency that they did or did not induce, the identification of the participants, an understanding of their role, and the objectives of the new examinations were all important dimensions. During hospitalization, explanations of who does what and the consistency of the information provided also played a role in this satisfaction. The quantitative survey (participation rate=89%) showed that 77% of the women were aware of the possibility of an in utero transfer. Nonetheless, most of them had very little information about the network.

It is possible to identify specific themes associated with women's satisfaction about in utero transfers that are useful for constructing a questionnaire that must, in turn, be validated.