La responsiveness dei sistemi sanitari: un’analisi empirica sull’assistenza ospedaliera nel Servizio sanitario regionale dell’Emilia-Romagna

[Machine translation] The publication of the World Health Report 2000 highlighted the concept of responsiveness as an indicator of health system performance. This indicator refers to the ability of a healthcare system to respond to patients' legitimate expectations on aspects of medical care that are not directly related to the improvement of their health conditions. In the literature, there are studies that investigate how standard socioeconomic characteristics, such as income or education, influence the way in which patients evaluate the responsiveness of health systems, but investigations have not yet been carried out relating to the relationship between the frequency of use of health services by patients and the assessment of the responsiveness of hospital facilities. This study fills the gap by analyzing a representative sample of about 2500 patients admitted to 9 hospitals in Emilia-Romagna, who were asked to evaluate 29 different aspects related to the quality of care, aspects that can be traced back to 6 domains of responsiveness (communication, privacy, dignity, waiting times, social support and quality of facilities). The data were collected through a questionnaire organized by the Emilia-Romagna Regional Health and Social Agency (Assr) in the period January 2010-December 2012. The results of the study suggest that patients already admitted in the last 5 years in the same ward where they are currently admitted report a better assessment of responsiveness than patients never admitted to that ward, even if this effect is statistically significant only for patients admitted in the last 6 months. More generally, the definition of an appropriate method for analyzing responsiveness at the level of an individual hospital facility may allow a more targeted definition of the areas in which to intervene with investments in specific staff training as well as the adjustment of structural characteristics that may negatively affect patients' perception.