Patients' perceived risks in hospitals: a grey qualitative analysis

Purpose This study aims to analyze the major risk categories that could be encountered in hospitals and other medical facilities and attempts to determine which are more important from the patients’ perspective for the purpose of improving to the hospital–patient relationship improvement. For this, five main risk categories are identified along with an overall perceived risk. Design/methodology/approach To extract the patients’ opinion over the considered types of risks in terms of importance and exposure to these risks when using the medical services, a questionnaire has been created and validated using AMOS 22.0.0. Due to the validation process, a series of variables have been excluded, while the selected ones have been used for calculating the overall perceived risk. Having the values of this risk for the entire set of respondents (N = 304), the grey incidence analysis has been applied to determine whether there is a correlation between the overall perceived risk and the frequency of medical services usage, the disease gravity, the hospitalisation period or the healing degree. Findings The human resources and the hospital conditions risk has been mentioned as the main risk category encountered by the respondents when accessing the medical services both in term of importance and exposure, shortly followed by the technological and hospital conditions risk. The overall perceived risk has a moderate to high average value on the entire set of respondents and it is mostly related to the frequency to which the respondents are utilising the medical services. Originality/value In this paper, the hospital’s risks are analysed from the patients’ point of view to see both their perception over these risks and the importance they are giving to these risks. More, an overall perceived risk has been determined, with a moderate to high value on the Likert scale (on this data set), which can be useful if extended to each hospital (and not calculated as a general indicator), as it can provide a landmark for patients when choosing a hospital.

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