Project

Patient Voice

In the current debate on quality and safety in medical healthcare services, patients are rarely listened to. On that account, it is necessary to better understand the instrument of formal patients’ complaints that is the patients’ voice in order to effectively use and promote it in a consumer policy-oriented manner. These complaints can provide valuable insights for regulation authorities, consumer advocates and patients’ associations into the otherwise concealed treatment process. Despite their proven effectiveness and pervasiveness formal complaints remain only a selectively used tool by patients. Reasons for this behavior often stay unexplored. Why does the majority of patients notwithstanding experiencing deplorable nuisances decide to keep silence instead of formally complain? When does a patient file a complaint and when does she not? The research project “Patient Voice” is trying to give an answer to these questions by empirically eliciting from a consumer perspective, which patient characteristics and specific treatment experiences have a statistically significant impact on the probability of filing a complaint in practice.