The Effect of Time-to-Provider, Left-without-Treatment and Length-of-Stay on Patient Satisfaction in Training Hospitals' Emergency Department, Iran

Background: It is necessary to consider into hospital emergency services' quantity and quality in different aspects such as time-to-provider, left-without-treatment and length-of-stay. The aimof this research was to identify the effect of these factors on patient satisfaction in training hospitals. Methods: In this descriptive-analytical and cross-sectional study, the sample size was calculated 768. The instrument included 54 questions and 8 sections. Three questions were in the field of following factors: 1) Time to provider was defined as the time from initial triage to initial provider evaluation. 2) Left-without-Treatment patients were defined as those who were initially triaged but were unable to be evaluated by a provider because they had left the ED. 3) Length-of-Stay was defined as time from initial triage to the time of final ED disposition, either discharge or admis-sion. It was analyzed by descriptive statistics, simple logistic regression, multiple logistic regressions, simple linear re-gression and multiple linear regression. Results: The time-to-provider lower than 15 minutes, LWOT and LOS lower than 6 hours were 92.8%, 3.9% and 90.3%, respectively. The mean of time-to-provider and the mean of LOS were 18.1 minutes and 202 minutes. Time-to-Provider affected satisfaction of admission, guardians, nursing care and managing proceedings (P<0.001). LOS af-fected satisfaction of admission, guardians and diagnosis proceedings (P<0.01). LWOT did not affect satisfaction and its domains (P>0.05). Conclusion: Decreasing time-to-provider and LOS has the effect on patient satisfaction in some domains. Further-more, left-without-treatment rate is not a good proxy of patient satisfaction.