THE latest survey on residents’ satisfaction with hospitals in Shenzhen for the third quarter was released by the Health Work Committee of the Shenzhen Municipal Party Committee on Friday.

Although the overall satisfaction index rose by 1.21 points compared with that of the second quarter, traffic congestion and the shortage of parking spaces around and inside hospitals remained the most dissatisfying problems.

In a bid to collect patients’ feedback on hospitals accurately, the work committee sent text messages to patients and asked them to reply with a number from 1 to 8 to indicate the most dissatisfying out of eight aspects including environment and facility, traffic and parking, medical staff’s attitude, waiting time, medical staff’s professionalism, privacy, process of complaints, as well as information accessibility.

It turned out that patients were mostly dissatisfied with traffic and parking conditions. Traffic around hospitals often gets congested as there is limited parking at most hospitals.

In fact, the city government has been trying to solve the vexing problems for years. This January, a number of government departments, including the transportation committee, development and reform committee, health committee and traffic police bureau, jointly rolled out a work proposal on tackling the problems and optimizing the situation.

One of the methods is to further sort out available space at the hospitals for parking. The management of parking also needs to be optimized, such as charging vehicles higher fees for visiting the hospitals for different purposes to dissuade drivers who don’t need to see a doctor from taking up the parking resources.

Another solution mentioned in the proposal is to improve public transportation systems around hospitals to encourage residents and patients with minor issues to take public transportation to hospitals.

The survey results varied when it came to different types of hospitals. For instance, for public hospitals, the most dissatisfying aspect is traffic and parking, while the least dissatisfying service was information accessibility. For private hospitals, patients were most dissatisfied with the medical staff’s professionalism, while privacy protection was the least dissatisfying.

A total of 117 hospitals of all types were surveyed. The three public hospitals with the highest satisfaction indexes are the Shenzhen Hospital of Occupational Disease, Luohu Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Hospital of Chinese People’s Armed Police Frontier Defense Forces.

The three public hospitals with lowest points are Longgang People’s Hospital, Pingshan People’s Hospital and Guangming People’s Hospital.

The top three private hospitals are Shenzhen Huaxia Eye Hospital, Shenzhen OCT Hospital and Shenzhen Liuhua Hospital. For government institutions that are in charge of health affairs, Yantian, Luohu and Dapeng health departments ranked in the top three places.

Additionally, 11 hospitals were criticized for offering late or incomplete contact information of their patients for the survey.

(Zhang Qian)