Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Hospital Service Quality And Patient Satisfaction

Service quality is the core of competition today, which has been paidwidespread attention. With the deepening of China’s medical reform, medicalindustry has faced intensive competition. Continuing to improve servicequality and put customer satisfaction in the first place is important to healthcare providers, which could largely enhance their competitiveness. This is aninevitable trend of development, just as any other industries. Western healthcare providers have attached great importance to patient perceived servicequality and patient satisfaction. Nowadays, American government would takepatient satisfaction into account when they pay the insurance. Health careproviders who have lower patient satisfaction would not get full payment.However, related research in Chinese hospital is still limited.This study attempts to understand patient perceived service quality factorswhich affect patient satisfaction. Surveys were conducted in both maternityspecific hospital with pregnant women and comprehensive hospital withgastroenterology patients. Pregnancy testing is routine examination, and withrepeated tests, pregnant women would pay large attention to perceived servicequality, instead of focusing on physicians skills only. Also, gastroenterologypatients are usually chronic patients, so acute patients is relatively few in thisdepartment, which result in more attention paid on perceived service quality.Based on SERVQUAL model theory and other previous study related to healthcare service quality and patient satisfaction, questionnaire were developed andmodified according to new requirements to health care providers and China’snational condition.102and87valid questionnaires were collected amongpregnant women and gastroenterology patients. Our finding showed thatenvironment and facilities, health providers concern and performance, and physicians concern and performance would affect patient satisfaction as forpregnant women. Environment and facilities and physicians concern andperformance would affect patient satisfaction as for gastroenterology patients.Service process had no significant effect on both patients. Compared withsimilar studies previously, the relationship between patient perceived servicequality and patient satisfaction was different.The main contribution of this study is to establish and test patient perceivedservice quality and satisfaction model in China with modified questionnaire.Also, in this research we analyzed the sub-dimension of two factors, providingcomprehensive and logical perspectives. Finally, different outcomes indifferent apartments were compared and analyzed with detailed explanation.