Patient satisfaction and experience of primary care in Saudi Arabia: a systematic review

This systematic review aims to explore patient satisfaction (PS) among patients who used Ministry of Health (MoH) primary care centres in Saudi Arabia, with a focus on their communication with physicians.

Medline, CINAHL, Embase, Global Health, the Saudi Medical Journal, Annals of Saudi Medicine, the Journal of Family and Community Medicine and Google Scholar.

The review focused on studies concerning PS in Saudi MoH primary care centres published between 2005 and 2017. Two independent reviewers confirmed that the included studies met the selection criteria, assessed the quality of the selected studies and extracted their significant characteristics. All of the articles were examined in terms of the five main domains that determine the patient-physician communication identified by Boquiren, Hack, Beaver et al. (What do measures of patient satisfaction with the doctor tell us? Patient Educ Couns 2015;98:1465-73).

The literature search retrieved a total of 846 studies. Only 10 studies met the selection criteria. All of the studies reported at least one domain of PS. There was a strong relationship between the level of education, income and satisfaction rate. Most of the studies reported PS in terms of the domains of availability and accessibility, and communication. Few of the studies covered the other domains, such as relational conduct, views on the physician's technical skills/knowledge and the personal qualities of physicians.

There was a contradiction between the patients' responses to the surveys on the domains of PS and their actual experience. While the patients reported that they were satisfied with primary care centres, they frequently attended the emergency department directly. This indicated that they were unlikely to be fully satisfied with the primary healthcare centre.