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 aim of 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. © 2015,iranian journal of public health. all rights reserved.