Abstract
In proceeding with treatment, it is essential to make decisions using a patient care decision-making process that is satisfactory to the patients. Recently, the concept “patient satisfaction” has been widely adopted. However, to measure “satisfactory decision-making,” it is considered very important to adopt the concept of “Regret” in the assessment of the quality of health care.
Therefore, this study was conducted to verify the relationships among the score on the Japanese version of the “Decision Regret Scale,” score on health-related quality of life, and patient factors in patients who had undergone surgery for inguinal hernia, cholelithiasis, cholecystitis, or gallbladder polyp.
A self-administered questionnaire survey was conducted of 128 patients aged less than 85 years who were discharged from Hospital A in Tokyo between July and December 2012. The questionnaire response recovery rate was 65%. Valid responses (n=79) were analyzed using a path analysis technique within structural equation modeling. The results showed that “gender” was the only factor directly affecting the score for “Regret,” and that the proportion of patients classified under “Regret” was higher in males than in females. It was suggested that other patient factors, “age,” “surgical techniques” and “complications” did not have any direct effect on the score for “Regret” but had an indirect effect through health-related quality of life.
