Satisfaction with care regards discrepancies between patients' expectations for care and the care they actually receive [6].
For instance, older patients may be more likely than younger patients to express satisfaction with care, possibly relating to differences in the expectations for care provision.
The expectations for care and nursing services in elderly people from urban, rural, and institutional environments are shown in Table 2.
Physician's non-fulfillment of patient's requests plays a significant role in patient's beliefs that physicians did not meet their expectations for care [ 33].
Georgy and colleagues in a review focusing on back pain patients' and doctors' expectations, found that patients and doctors conceptualise their expectations differently and have a wide-range of specific expectations for care [ 79].
These include the staffs' knowledge on how to provide palliative care, their attitude toward palliative care, staffing levels, lack of physician support, lack of privacy, family expectations for care, and the hospitalization of residents [ 9].
It is possible that rural women reported less unmet need because they had lower expectations for care and thus were more likely to be satisfied with the care they received.
Increasingly, end-of-life (EOL) care is receiving the attention of policy makers and the public, influencing debates on physician-assisted suicide shaping their expectations for care at the end of life [ 3].
Notably, patients involved in these difficult encounters had worse outcomes in terms of less satisfaction with the visit, more unmet expectations for care, and higher subsequent health care utilization.
The ability to relinquish expectations for care from adult children provides the extended family with more human resources that may facilitate the potential for social and economic mobility of future generations (Burholt and Dobbs 2010).
