EVALUATION OF PATIENTS' SATISFACTION OF MODERN HEALTH CARE FACILITIES UTILIZATION IN NASARAWA STATE - NIGERIA

There is growing interest to measure patient satisfaction and collect the views of patients about the services they use. Satisfaction is essential if we have to get people utilize services, comply with treatments and improve health outcomes. This paper prospectively studied current patients' satisfaction of Modem Health Care Facilities Utilization in 21 health centers in Nasarawa State over a four - month's period. Descriptive statistics was largely employed. Participants with respect to preference to traditional medicine were categorized into groups and ranked according to frequency of response. The precision of the proportion of respondent noted to have given a specific category of response was measured by computing the 95% confidence interval around the estimates. Both the time spent on physician-patient consultations (3.9 ± 3.5 minutes) and mean pharmacy dispensing time (28.8 ± 23.7 seconds) were short, resulting in a patient knowledge of prescribed drug dose of 77.7%. No center had an essential drugs list and/or formulary available. An average of 80% of key drugs was available at centers. High medical charges, health workers attitude toward patients' are among other factors responsible for low utilization of health care facilities in Nasarawa State. Baseline data gathered by this study can be used by researchers and health policymakers to monitor and improve patients' satisfaction utilization of health care facilities in Nasarawa State.