What shapes patient's satisfaction in countries' health care systems?

Patient satisfaction is an important measure of health care quality as it offers information on the provider’s success at meeting clients’ expectations and is a key determinant of patients’ perspective behavioral intention. This paper studies the relationship between patient’s satisfaction of healthcare system and a set of socio-economic and health provision indicators. We first construct an index of patient’s satisfaction and then, at a second stage, this index is related to economic and health provision variables. Our empirical analysis relies on 31 countries and for four years. Our findings support a strong positive association between citizens’ satisfaction and public health expenditures, number of physicians and nurses, and the age of the patient, while there is a negative evidence for private health spending and number of hospital beds.