Patient-Centered Care and Associated Factors at Public and Private Hospitals of Addis Ababa: Patients’ Perspective

BACKGROUND: Patient-centered care is a practice of caring for patients in ways that are valuable to the individual patient and families. Implementation of the practice is a common problem worldwide. In Ethiopia, the available information is limited and is largely skewed to certain dimensions of the practice. OBJECTIVE: To assess the patient-centered health care practice and associated factors among public and private general hospitals of Addis Ababa 2020. METHODS: An institution-based comparative cross-sectional study was conducted in two public, and seven private general hospitals located in Addis Ababa from April 08 to May 20, 2020. A multistage sampling technique was employed to select the study participants. Data were collected using an interviewer-administered structured questioner, then entered into Epi-data version 3.1, and finally analyzed using SPSS version 25. Multivariable logistic regression was used to identify independent predictors of clients’ perceived patient-centered care. Statistical significance was declared at p-value <0.05 and adjusted odds ratio with 95% confidence interval. RESULTS: A total of 570 patients were involved with 99.8% response rate. About 49% (95% CI: 45.0–53.1) of patients rated the practice as good. It was 27.8% (95% CI: 22.5–33.1), and 70.2% (95% CI: 64.6–75.4) for public, and private hospitals, respectively Hospital type (AOR:0.21; 95% CI: 0.13–0.35), service easiness (AOR:3.3; 95% CI: 2.0–5.8), hospital attractiveness (AOR:2.3; 95% CI: 1.2,4.5), privacy to access care (AOR:2.0; 95% CI: 1.1,4.1), information on plan of care (AOR:2.3; 95% CI; 1.1,4.6), information on medication (AOR:3.1; 95% CI; 1.5,6.3), and perceived intimacy with the provider (AOR: 0.4; 95% CI;0.2,0.8) were the factors associated with the practice. CONCLUSION: Even though providing patient-centered care has been the focus of quality improvement in Ethiopia, this study showed it is mostly being implemented from the traditional provider-centered approach and public hospitals were lower in practice than private hospitals.