Celebrating Doctors' Day (July 1) at a time when assaults on doctors at workplaces is seeing a spike across the country, the Union government’s unique patient feedback service app — ‘Mera Aspataal’ — has thrown up some interesting data which indicate that the major cause of dissatisfaction among the patients includes poor behaviour of hospital staff, high cost of treatment and lack of cleanliness in medical centres.
Of those surveyed, 75% of the patients said they were satisfied and the remaining not satisfied. While 39% responded saying they were unhappy because of staff behaviour, 17% felt the cost of treatment was high and 12 % expressed dissatisfaction over the lack of cleanliness in hospitals.
Launched in 2016, the app has seen a scale-up, reaching to 2.1 million patients from 29 States and Union Territories, with more than 27.4 million patients being contacted (January 2018-April 2019) through text messages and phone calls for providing feedback.
Currently ‘Mera Aspataal’ covers 22 Central government and 530 private empanelled hospitals, besides 2,208 college hospitals, primary health centres and district hospitals, among others.
“Studies across the globe reported that patients’ feedback can help improve the quality of healthcare services and health outcomes, foster healthy competition among the providers and enable patients to make an informed decision in choosing health facilities,’’ said a senior health official in charge of the programme.
This “simple and intuitive multi-lingual phone and web-based patients’ feedback system is aimed at making the health system responsive to patients needs,” he added.
T.N., Gujarat ahead in app use
Tamil Nadu and Gujarat currently lead in terms of good coverage and use of the initiative. Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Delhi, Haryana and Karnataka too show a positive uptake of the app.
The official said, “The app is a simple, unbiased system for collecting, analysing and sharing patients feedback with no human resources requirement. This is breakthrough application is also able to bring accountability and responsiveness to the patients’ needs within the public health system. Policy and decision-makers at the national and the State-level are directly monitoring the Central and State government facilities respectively on a regular basis with the use of patients’ feedback data from the app.”
