Community Health Center in China：Service Quality of Health Care and Practitioners' Satisfaction

ABSTRACT

Objectives: The study aims to evaluate service quality of woman and child health care and gauge practitioners' job-satisfaction among different community health centers (CHCs) with different ownership.

Method: The study is conducted in 94 CHCs in Wuhan, Hubei provinces of China. The service quality of woman and child health care is investigated with questionnaire by quantitative grading in six aspects, such as diagnosis and treatment disease, recovering from illness, prevention disease, immunization, health education, planned-parenthood technique service. The survey and focus group participants are drawn from practitioners (n=574).

Results: The values of private CHCs groups are lower than those of state-owner CHCs groups (u =-2.06, P <0.05) and collective-owner CHCs groups (u =-1.88, P <0.05). Low levels of satisfaction are registered for five items asked in the questionnaire: current job (24.4%), level of skill (33.8%), opportunity for continuing medical education (CME, 75.6%), interaction with other practitioners (59.0%), and avail-ability of supporting laboratory and instrument services (35.5%).

Conclusions: A revitalized medical profession that is fully engaged in the reforming process could also significantly impact the success of ongoing health care reforming efforts. The feedback points to the need for an appropriate regulatory framework guide the development of Chinese evolving health care market of woman and child health care. The government should help private CHCs to strengthen their technique levels, and pay attention to compensate private CHCs funds.