Parents’ Satisfaction with Early Intervention Medical Rehabilitation Program Services in Taipei

• Main Authors: Yaling Chen, 陳雅鈴
• Other Authors: 許玫玲
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/12958334038872661733

碩士 === 臺北醫學大學 === 醫務管理學研究所 === 95 === To encourage more hospitals to deliver early intervention medical services to those children with developmental delay problems, the governments of Taipei City and Taipei County have started to subsidize them financially. Besides, these governments also monitor their service quality. The purposes of this study are to understand the degree to which the parents are satisfied with the early intervention medical rehabilitation services and to explore the factors that are associated with parents’ levels of satisfaction. This study surveyed 775 parents using self-administered questionnaires. Five hundred and thirty-six responded and the response was 69.2%. The final valid sample size was 515. Using Likert’s 5-points scale, the questionnaire consisted of four dimensions of satisfaction measures: ‘assistance to the child’, ‘assistance to the parents’, ‘the provision of information regarding medial, educational, and social welfare resources’, and ‘program arrangement, hospital facilities, and professional capability’. We calculate the mean score for each dimension and the overall mean score. The questionnaires results revealed that most parents were satisfied with early intervention medical program services. The mean score of overall satisfaction of the medical service is 3.82, approximately between ‘fairly satisfied’ to ‘satisfied’. Among these four dimensions, parents were most satisfied with ’assistance to the parents’, with mean score 3.93. The least satisfied dimension was ‘the provision of information regarding medial, educational, and social welfare resources’, with mean score 3.50. Specifically, they were less satisfied with the provision of information of parenting skills, the transition planning, and social welfare resources. In the dimension of ’assistance to the child’, parents felt very satisfied with the training program, home program, the service attitude of the therapists, and the gross motor improvement of their children. But they felt dissatisfied with the self-care skills and emotional control of their children. In the dimension of ‘program arrangement, hospital facilities, and professional capability’, parents were generally very satisfied. In general, parents’ overall satisfaction was not associated with children’s characteristics such as age, sex, diagnosis and disease severity, but associated with hospital type, parents’ education, household income, mother or not, duration of receiving rehabilitation services, and the waiting time for the rehabilitation program. Based on the findings, the suggestions of this study were：(1) The early intervention medical service providers should improve the provision of information regarding parenting skills, transition planning, and social welfare resources. It is recommended that full-time social workers are available to provide help for families with developmental delay children. (2) Governments may refer to the experience of Taipei, and set up the subsidy system to promote the early intervention services in other cities to benefit more children with developmental delay.