Patient Satisfaction Towards Outpatient Pharmacy Services and Associated Factors at Dessie Town Public Hospitals, South Wollo, North-East Ethiopia

Background: Satisfaction of patients is a key measure of quality pharmacy service delivery. However, the traditional way of drug inventory and dispensing practice by professionals negatively affects the satisfaction of patients. Hence, assessment of satisfaction level is an important tool to identify gaps in pharmacy service delivery and works for its improvement. Objective: To determine the level of patients' satisfaction towards outpatient pharmacy service and contributing factors at Dessie Town Public Hospitals, South Wollo, North-east Ethiopia, 2020. Methods: We implement a facility-based cross-sectional survey on 414 patients over the age of 18 years from the outpatient pharmacy service of Dessie town public hospitals. The study was done from February to June 2020 through a systematic random sampling method and face-to-face pharmacy exit interview using the Self Reporting Questionnaire-17. We used Epi-data version 3.1 for data entry and SPSS-21 software for analysis. We assessed the strength of association in the binary logistic regression with odds ratio and declare statistical significance with p-value <0.05. Results: Among the total patients participated, 246 (59.4%) were satisfied towards outpatient pharmacy services. In this finding, comfortability of waiting area [AOR=1.87, 95% CI, (1.13, 4.18)], frequency of visit [AOR=2.4; 95% CI, (1.19, 4.80)], and payment status [AOR=2.90; 95% CI, (1.21, 6.95)] showed a positive association towards satisfaction. On the other hand, age (28-37 years) [AOR=0.16, 95% CI, (0.08-0.34)], number of drug dispensed [AOR=0.3; 95% CI, 0.13-0.41] and medication availability [AOR=0.44, 95% CI, (0.26, 0.71)] showed a negative association with patient satisfaction. Conclusion and Recommendations: The findings of the current study revealed that patients' satisfaction towards outpatient pharmacy services provided by public Hospitals at Dessie town was low. Hence, hospitals need to take attention to and consider the identified gaps like improving the availability of drugs, comfortability of waiting area, payment status, and the number of drugs dispensed, and the frequency of visits.