Results

A total of 501 questionnaires were completed and successfully submitted online. Of those submitted none had any missing data. Of those 501 responses, 33 answered that they had not contact with their GP in the last 12 months therefore excluded. All 468 responses were fully analysed. This gave a response rate of 9.38%. It needs to be noted that we could not assess how many emails reached the beneficiaries as there is the potential of the email ending up in the spam folders and never been looked at. Despite that at 50% of population proportion our sample gave a 95% chance that the real value is within ±4.31% of the measured satisfaction value.

Participant characteristics

Participant characteristics are shown in Table 1. The age of the participants ranged for 18-84 with a mean (SD) age of the responders 45.14(12.53). The majority of the responders were female 58.97%. As far as the level of education is concerned, the majority of the participants had graduated from tertiary education (79.71% ) while the lowest percentage (0.21%) is recorded for those who have not finished the compulsory primary school. Regarding the self-rated health, the vast majority of participants evaluated their state of health as good or very good (77.78%) and as poor or fairly good (4.27%), while 17.95% evaluated their health as excellent. Around one third of the participants (31.82%) stated that they have a chronic condition. Also, the majority of the patients (52.76 %) visited their doctor up to 2 times in the last 12 months.

Patient satisfaction

The mean experience scores of study participants using the mean(SD),median(IQR) floor and ceiling effects for the 23 items are shown in Table 2. All items with the exception of item 22, had a ceiling effect larger than 50% (range: 50.6%-66.3%). For all items, the distribution was skewed to ‘excellent’
The lowest mean(SD) score was for the item “Waiting time in the waiting room?” (4.05(1.08)) while the second lowest was “Being able to speak to the GP on the telephone” with a mean(SD) 4.25 (1.06). The highest mean (SD) satisfaction was for the item “Keeping your records and data confidential?” (4.65 (0.70)). The majority of the mean item scores were heavily skewed towards positive evaluations. The ceiling effects ranged from 43.67%–77.70% while floor effects were all less than 4%.
Exploratory factor analysis did not reveal any underlying sub-dimension in the satisfaction scale. The reliability of the tool was very high (Cronbach’s alpha 0.98).
The overall % satisfaction of all beneficiaries was 80.51% (SD 32.36). Further analysis of the % satisfaction was performed for the sociodemographic measures collected. A Mann Whitney test was performed to assess differences of median % satisfaction between gender. The results indicate no statistically significant difference between the two (p-value=0.1323). The same test was used to assess the differences between satisfaction and whether the beneficiary has a chronic disease. Again, the results indicated no statistical significant difference (p value=0.9612). A Kruskal-Wallis H test was performed to determine of % satisfaction was associated with different age groups (18-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-65, >65). This test showed that there was no statistically significant difference in the satisfaction % between the six groups , χ2 (5)=1.226 p-value=0.9424. The same was true for education (primary, secondary tertiary) χ2 (2)=1.955 p-value=0.3763, the number of GP visits (1,2,3-5, 6+) χ2 (3)=5.400 p-value=0.1448 and the health status (excellent, very good/good, fair/poor) χ2 (2)=1.494 p-value=0.4738.