Diet satisfaction and associated factors among adult surgical orthopaedic inpatients at a teaching hospital in Lusaka province, Zambia; a hospital-based cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND: Poor quality of food services in hospital contributes to low diet satisfaction among inpatients in both developed and developing countries. However, there is paucity of literature on diet satisfaction in health care facilities in the sub-Saharan region and in particular Zambia. Therefore, this study sought to assess levels of diet satisfaction among adult surgical orthopaedic inpatients at a teaching hospital in Lusaka province, Zambia. METHODS: A hospital-based cross-sectional study was conducted over a period of three months. Comprehensive sampling was used to select 98 study participants. A researcher-administered questionnaire adapted from a similar study was used to collect data. The instrument used in this study had 9 aspects of satisfaction. Descriptive statistics such as frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviations were used to analyze the data. Chi-square test was used to test for associations between categorical data. A p-value of less than 0.05 was considered to be statistically significant. RESULTS: In this study, 64.3% of surgical orthopaedic inpatients were not satisfied with overall quality of hospital food. In addition, 76.5, 96.9, 65.3 and 71.4% of the patients were not satisfied with type, variety, appearance and taste of hospital food respectively. However, patients who were satisfied with portion size, temperature and time of meal distribution were 67.3, 94.9 and 56.1% respectively. There was no significant association between variables of age, sex, education level, marital status, monthly income, days in hospital and overall satisfaction (p > 0.05). CONCLUSION: Low diet satisfaction is a global problem associated with poor quality of hospital meals. Although the majority of surgical orthopaedic inpatients were not satisfied with more than half of the dimensions of diet satisfaction, they were satisfied with aspects of portion size, temperature and time of meal distribution. Therefore, an assessment of diet satisfaction can inform hospital administrators and policy makers on the deficiencies in hospital diets and thereby help improve quality of meals. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s40795-019-0288-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.