Patients’ Satisfaction with Public Health Care Services in Bangladesh: Some Critical Issues

Abstract

This paper attempts to explore the experiences of Bangladeshi patient with public health care services, clients self-perception of health, understanding their expectation and demands of health care towards government health practitioners and service providers. The study points out the issues and difficulties they faced in treatment or getting other services and presents some recommendations to improve the public hospital services.The study was undertaken using the interpretivist paradigm and based on qualitative research method with various data collection procedures, such as interview, focus group discussion (FGD), documentation survey, etc. were employed to collect necessary information. The data highlight a continuous cycle of marginalisation resulting from the interplay of health service providers and their business counter-parts e.g. private pharmaceutical companies, diagnostic centres which reduce the opportunity of protecting patients’ consumer rights at large scale. Therefore, the study suggests that policy makers and service providers should be more responsive to initiate effective policy measures and programmes to combat marginalisation and exclusion of that poor patient groups.