Comfortable Waiting Time of Patients at the OPD with Varying Demographics

Abstract

This study investigated the comfortable waiting time of patients arriving at the OPD. The data was collected from private ABC hospital of Karachi, Pakistan by using questionnaire. 200 questionnaire responses were collected from the patients. Reliability of the questionnaire was calculated by using Cronbach alpha test (alpha=0.66). Five hypothesis were developed in order to reveal the difference in comfortable waiting time of patients having demographic characteristics i.e., gender, age groups, visiting time and monthly income of patients. The data was analyzed in the Statistical Package of Social Sciences (SPSS) version 22. Firstly, skewness and kurtosis of the data was computed, and the values did not come in normal range; therefore, one hypothesis was tested by Mann Whitney U test and rest of four hypothesis were tested by applying Kruskal Wallice test. Results indicated that the comfortable waiting time of males and females was same: whereas, it was not same across the different age groups and income groups: furthermore, patients having different OPD visiting experience (1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd) had the same comfortable waiting time.

Keywords: OPD, comfortable waiting time, demographics