RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN QUALITY OF DIABETES CARE
Patient satisfaction is increasingly recognized as an important aspect of the quality of medical care. It is accepted that patient satisfaction is determined by many factors of care delivery, including communication among the patient, the provider, and the health care system; accessibility; availability; and convenience. For these reasons, patient satisfaction has been recently proposed as an indicator of the quality of diabetes care in the United States by the National Committee of Quality Assurance for the Diabetes Quality Improvement Project (DQIP)A However, the relationship between the process measures of the quality of diabetes care and patient satisfaction has not been examined to date.
We hypothesized that patient satisfaction depends on the quality of care. We, therefore, analyzed the associations between the delivery of preventive care by the providers, performance of preventive care practices by patients, and satisfaction of patients with the services of health care providers. Patients in this study were a population-based sample of 591 African-American adults >18 years with self-reported diabetes who were surveyed at baseline in Project DIRECT before the community-based intervention study was commenced.
