Health system responsiveness
Responsiveness to people’s expectations is one of the three intrinsic goals of health
systems. The concept of responsiveness includes the extent to which individuals are
treated with dignity, autonomy and confidentiality; it also includes receiving prompt
attention, the quality of basic amenities, access to social support networks during care
and choice of care provider (24). A patient-oriented approach to the assessment of responsiveness
is the measurement of satisfaction, based on the assumption that the elements
of responsiveness relate to the individual needs of patients and of all inhabitants.
User satisfaction with health services, while subjective by nature, provides information
about how well the health system responds to the expectations of the population.
Ideally, indicators of responsiveness would focus on measuring perceptions of the dimensions
listed above. However, aside from the 1997 survey on health system responsiveness
used for The world health report 2000 (24), most comparable international surveys do not
systematically address these concepts but instead focus on overall impressions of satis-