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Outpatient departments (OPDs) need to monitor the quality of care and patient satisfaction for continuous quality improvement. Additionally, there is a need for an increase in focused literature on patient satisfaction and quality of health care at a tertiary care level. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to fulfil this need.

A cross‐sectional hospital‐based study among OPD patients was undertaken, where investigators conducted interviews with 120 patients at entry (registration), 120 patients at the OPD clinic (60 doctor‐patient interactions and 60 exit interviews), and a further 120 patients at investigation facilities. Patient satisfaction, client convenience facilities, prescription quality, doctor‐patient interaction and other quality elements as described in the study were given score of 0 or 1.

At exit, 52 (86.6 percent) patients were satisfied with the OPD care. The mean total quality score was 80.9 percent of the total scores. It was above 90 percent of the total score for patient convenience facilities and for doctor‐patient interaction, 76 percent for the prescription quality of the doctors and 43.3 percent for signage display. The mean score for patient‐doctor interaction was found to be significantly lower (3.6/5) among dissatisfied patients compared to the satisfied patients (4.7/5). Satisfied patients reported a significantly higher consultation time (12.4 minutes) with a doctor compared to dissatisfied patients (8.5 minutes) (p=0.04).

Not using a Likert scale to measure patient satisfaction could be considered a limitation. However, the authors also arrived at similar conclusions with their tools as with the use of Likert scales in other studies. Furthermore, findings are limited to medicine and surgery general OPDs in a tertiary care setting. Any interpretation beyond this frame may be done with caution.

Hospitals should encourage good patient‐doctor interaction as it has emerged as the key factor associated with patient satisfaction.

Quality improvements in public sector health institutes can lead to better utilization of health care by the poor and compromised sections of society and can lead to a reduction in the inequity associated with health care.

This paper fulfils the need to evaluate quality of hospital care in public sector hospitals at the tertiary care level. The methods and tools used are simple and extensive enough to capture information at multiple service points.

It is essential to track the development of resource and pollution intensive industries such as textile, leather, pharmaceutical, etc., under burgeoning pressure of environmental compliance. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the progress of Indian leather industry in terms of individual factors and total factor productivity.

This study applies and examines the various concepts of productivity such as labor productivity, capital productivity, material productivity and energy productivity. Further, it assesses and compares the performance of Indian leather industry in Tamil Nadu (TN), West Bengal (WB) and Uttar Pradesh (UP) based on productivity analysis, spatial variations determinants in productivity and technology closeness ratio.

The findings suggest that as per the productivity analysis, WB leather clusters have performed remarkably better in terms of partial factor productivity and technical efficiency (TE), followed by TN and UP. This can be attributed to shifting of leather cluster of WB to a state-of art leather complex with many avenues for resource conservation. Further, the findings reveal that the firm size and partial factor productivities have significant positive correlation with TE which supports technological theory of the firm.

The results of this study can be useful for the policy makers associated with the Indian leather industry especially to design interventions to support capacity building at individual firm level as well as cluster level to enhance the efficiency and productivity of overall industry.

The findings also support the resource dependence theory of firm according to which the larger size firms should reflect on resource conservation practices, for instance the concept of prevention is better than cure based upon 3R (reduce, recycle and reuse) principles.

The paper gives an explanation of the productivity in the leather industry in terms of its factor productivity and TE.