Objective: To examine the levels of patients' satisfaction with the Thai traditional medicine services of the Department of ThaiTraditional Medicine and the influences on the level of satisfaction of population and service characteristics.
Material and Methods: The sample comprised 320 selected patients from all patients attending the Department of Thai Traditional Medicine of the Community Health Centre of Songkhla Hospital, Songkhla province during October-December 2004. The data were collected using a questionnaire which assessed the patients' satisfaction with the services using a Likert scale, and obtained patients’ opinions on general satisfaction, technical quality, interpersonal manner, communication, financial aspects, time spent, and accessibility and convenience of the Thai traditional medicine services. Data were analyzed by SPSS program version 10.0 for one-way ANOVA, correlation and independent-samples t-test at 95% confidence.
Results and conclusion: The findings showed that the patients were highly satisfied with all 7 dimensions of Thai traditional medicine services (Mean 3.88, SD 0.53). The factors that influenced patient satisfaction were population characteristics such as occupation (general service had the highest score) and the service itself (medical treatment and health promotion had the highest scores).