The paper discusses the concepts of "user's satisfaction", "responsiveness", "humanization" and patient's rights, focusing on their convergences and differences, as well as their reliability when used in the evaluation of health services and systems. Satisfaction and responsiveness are viewed as operational concepts, integrating user’s views, while humanization and patients’s rights concern to normative principles which serve as grounds for policies and programs. While satisfaction studies put a light on the patient’s role in health services and systems, the concept of responsiveness strengthened its position, giving him the status of an individual and citizen, that is, a subject of universal rights. This conceptual and methodological framework is viewed as part of a paradigm of rights - individual, social and political -, which is used also in the area of evaluation of quality and health care.
User’s satisfaction; Responsiveness; Humanization; Patient’s rights
