Patient waiting time in the outpatient clinic at a central surgical hospital of Vietnam: Implications for resource allocation

Background: Patient waiting time is considered as a crucial parameter in the assessment of healthcare quality and patients' satisfaction towards healthcare services. Data concerning this has remained limited in Vietnam. Thus, this study aims to assess patient waiting time in the outpatient clinic in Viet Duc Hospital (Hanoi, Vietnam) in order to enable stakeholders to inform evidence-based interventions to improve the quality of healthcare services. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted from June 2014 to June 2015 in the outpatient clinic at Viet Duc Hospital. Waiting time stratified by years (2014 and 2015), months of the year, weekdays, and hours of the day were extracted from Hospital Management software and carefully calculated. Stata 12.0 was employed to analyze data, including the average time (M± SD), frequencies and percentage (%). Results: There was a total of 137,881 patients involved in the study. The average waiting time from registration to preliminary diagnosis in 2014 was 50.41 minutes, and in 2015 was 42.05 minutes. A longer waiting time was recorded in the morning and in those having health insurance. Conclusions: Our study highlights the essential need for human resource promotion to reduce patient waiting time. Also, attention should be paid to the simplification of administrative procedures in order to reduce waiting time among insured patients.