Patient satisfaction studies are increasingly being used as a measure of the quality of the hospital service. In the Danish model for health technology assessment, moreover, the patient perspective is one of the four elements assessed. Patient satisfaction studies are considered to be useful information for future patients and an important quality development tool. A key question then, is whether patient experience actually reflects the quality of the medical treatment that they receive – and conversely, whether the health care professionals’ assessment of their own performance corresponds to that of the patients.

It is characteristic of the topic of this report that research within the field is relatively sparse. One of the reasons for performing the study was thus to acquire new knowledge in a relatively underdeveloped field of research.