Messina, et. al studied The Relationship Between Patient Satisfaction and Inpatient Admissions Across Teaching and Nonteaching Hospitals. The patient satisfaction rate is sometimes considered more of an implicit quantity. The article was published in 2009 in the Journal of Healthcare Management. In this study, different variables involved in the patient satisfaction are studied under the light of Spearman Coefficient. The test sample was conducted in 7 teaching and 7 fully fledged hospitals forced the researchers to use the Spearman coefficient. s. But what is the Spearman coefficient? It is an explicit function used to conduct the relationship between different variables. This relation is described by a monotonous variable. The two variables used are satisfaction and admissions of any particular hospital. Patient satisfaction is taken as an independent variable and admission is considered a dependent variable.
The researchers performed correlational analyses on the pooled sample of 7 teaching and 7 nonteaching hospitals. After this, an analysis of the differences between the teaching and the nonteaching sample was performed. This was done using the Mann-Whitney U-test. After this analysis, the researchers did a separate analysis on the 7 teaching and the 7 nonteaching hospitals. The two variables were used to discern the nature of the association between admissions and satisfaction mean scores (Messina 182).
As said before, the study focused on inpatient admissions and satisfaction rate. There is a spinoff of the first question in which the satisfaction rate between teaching hospitals and their non teaching counterparts is shown (Messina 177). The study responded to the Spearman question and we came to know that that there is a negative relation between inpatient admissions and satisfaction rate. The results show that a higher patient satisfaction score is associated with low patient volumes. On the second research question, the results showed that there was a positive relationship between patient satisfaction and inpatient admissions in teaching hospitals (Messina 182). There was also witnessed positive relationship in the case of teaching hospitals. However, for the nonteaching sample, there existed a negative relationship due to a variety of reasons cited.
Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient is appropriately used in this study. This is because descriptive statistics values like means, medians and standard deviations were computed. The values were then ranked and used to determine the characteristic of the participating hospitals based on patient satisfaction mean scores and inpatient volume data. Ranking is a very important element in Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient tests because it is through ranking that the individual observation of the parameters was ranked into two ordered series (Jackson 162). The skewness and kurtosis were also measured to determine the spread of the sample used (Osborn 275).
In conclusion, the study had objective of determining the relationship between patient satisfaction and inpatient admissions across teaching and nonteaching hospitals. Spearman coefficient of rank-order was used in this study to determine this relationship. The variables used were satisfaction and admissions. These variables were ranked after which the researchers studied whether a change in one rank affected the other rank. The results of the study showed that there is a negative relationship between inpatient admission and patient satisfaction in the combined sample. On the second research question, the results showed that there was a positive relationship between patient satisfaction and inpatient admissions in teaching hospitals. Spearman coefficient of rank-order was effectively used in this study.
Works Cited
Jackson, Sherri. Research Methods and Statistics: A Critical Thinking Approach. New York:
Cengage Learning, 2011. Print.
Messina Daniel et, al. “The Relationship Between Patient Satisfaction and Inpatient Admissions
Across Teaching and Nonteaching Hospitals.” Journal of Healthcare Management. 54.3 (2009): 177-190. Print.
Osborn, Carol E. Statistical Applications for Health Information Management. New York: Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2005. Print.
