Patients’ satisfaction with the quality of medical services at different stages of the project “Lean hospital” in Tomsk region

The purpose of the study was to analyze the state of satisfaction of the population in the provision of medical services and to observe the changes taking place in this area in connection with the start of the national project “Lean Polyclinic”. The studies were conducted in the form of a questionnaire survey of patients of two medical institutions, namely: the Regional Public Health Institutions “Children’s City Hospital No. 2” and “B. I. Alperovich City Clinical Hospital No. 3”.The material of the study was the responses on paper of the interviewed patients. The average indicators of patient satisfaction with the received medical services were determined by means of statistical calculations. The survey was conducted at the start of the project in May‑July of 2017 and again in October‑December of 2017.Results. The initial survey revealed the presence of such problems as insufficient number of automated workplaces; heavy workload of the doctor when working in the Medical Information System of the Tomsk Region; imperfection of the card filing cabinet; insufficient number of racks for storing outpatient cards, front-office and back-office were located in the same room and did not have a partition, which created noise and interfered with the work of call-center operators; the need to contact the registry to get the outpatient card when the visit was previously assigned; difficult orientation of patients in the clinic; long-term preventive examination of children aged 1 year; mixed flows of healthy and sick patients; and lack of personnel. The repeated survey reflected the changes that occurred in connection with the start of the “Lean Polyclinic” project: the number of detected violations tended to decrease, which indicated the improvement in the quality of services and the improvement in the organization of medical personnel work.Conclusion. Thus, the present study established that the use of lean production technologies contributed to the quality of medical services and it had a beneficial effect on the processes of organizing the work of medical institutions.