Heart Surgery Waiting Time: Assessing the Effectiveness of an Action

BACKGROUND: Waiting time is an index assessing patient satisfaction, managerial effectiveness and horizontal equity in providing health care. Although heart surgery centers establishment is attractive for politicians. They are always faced with the question of to what extent they solve patient’s problems. OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study was to evaluate factors influencing waiting time in patients of heart surgery centers, and to make recommendations for health-care policy-makers for reducing waiting time and increasing the quality of services from this perspective. PATIENTS AND METHODS: This cross-sectional study was performed in 2013. After searching articles on PubMed, Elsevier, Google Scholar, Ovid, Magiran, IranMedex, and SID, a list of several criteria, which relate to waiting time, was provided. Afterwards, the data on waiting time were collected by a researcher-structured checklist from 156 hospitalized patients. The data were analyzed by SPSS 16. The Kolmogorov Smirnov and Shapiro tests were used for determination of normality. Due to the non-normal distribution, non-parametric tests, such as Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney were chosen for reporting significance. Parametric tests also used reporting medians. RESULTS: Among the studied variables, just economic status had a significant relation with waiting time (P = 0.37). Fifty percent of participants had diabetes, whereas this estimate was 43.58% for high blood pressure. As the cause of delay, 28.2% of patients reported financial problems, 18.6% personal problem and 13.5% a delay in providing equipment by the hospital. CONCLUSIONS: It seems the studied hospital should review its waiting time arrangements and detach them, as far as possible, from subjective and personal (specialists) decisions. On the other hand, ministries of health and insurance companies should consider more financial support. It is also recommend that hospitals should arrange preoperational psychiatric consultation for increasing patients’ emotionally readiness.