Content area
Full text
In today's highly competitive environment, hospitals are increasingly realizing the need to focus on service quality as a measure to improve their competitive position. Customer based determinants and perceptions of service quality, therefore, play an important role when choosing a hospital. In this paper, we present a service quality perception study-undertaken in five hospitals in Bangalore city. The well-documented 'Service Quality Model' was used as a conceptual framework for understanding service quality delivery in health care services. The measuring instrument used in this study was the SERVQUAL questionnaire for the measurement of Gap 5 and Gap 1. An analysis covering a sample of 500 patients revealed that there exists an overall service quality gap between patients' perceptions and their expectations. An analysis covering a sample of 40 management personnel revealed that a gap between managements' perception about patients' expectations and patients' expectations of service quality also exists. The study suggests improvements across all the five dimensions of service quality - tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy.
INTRODUCTION
Research evidence in both the manufacturing and services industries indicates that delivering high service quality produces measurable benefits in profit, cost savings and market share (Ziethaml, Berry and Parasuraman, 1988). In India, the past few years have witnessed an increasing concern regarding the quality of healthcare services. The globalisation and liberalisation policies have significantly changed the health care scenario in India. With increasing awareness, the patients, as consumers expect quality in healthcare services. Quality has been shown to be an important element in the consumers' choice of hospitals (Lynch and Schuler, 1990). In the light of these changes, there is an emerging need to improve the quality of healthcare services.
Researchers commonly divide service quality into two components: technical quality and functional quality (Gronroos, 1984: Parasuraman et al., 1985: Lewis and Mitchel, 1990: Lewis, 1991). Technical quality is defined primarily on the basis of technical accuracy and procedures. Functional quality refers to the manner in which service is delivered to the customer. In the health care setting, patients understandably tend to rely on functional attributes (eg., facilities, cleanliness, quality of hospital food, hospital personnels' attitudes etc.,) rather than technical attributes when evaluating the service quality because they are unable to evaluate the technical quality due to...