Using importance-performance analysis (IPA), this paper examines the perceptions of patients and managers of health centres of several health care quality services attributes. IPA is an approach to the measurement of customer/user satisfaction which allows for a simple and functional identification of both the strong and the weak aspects, or improvement areas, of a given service. Taking both the importance assigned by users to all relevant aspects of a given service and the perceived performance of the establishment in providing the service, the result is an IPA grid with four quadrants. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time this methodology has been used to compare the perceptions of health centre patients and managers. The results showed patients and managers to have very different perceptions of all the quality service attributes. Implications for researchers and health centre managers are discussed. The study illustrates the usefulness of the IPA model as a managerial tool in identifying areas to which marketing resources should be allocated in order to improve and enhance the quality of the health centre services provided
Purpose -Service quality is an elusive and abstract construct, so that particular effort is required to establish a valid measure. Patients' perceptions of health services seem to have been largely ignored by health care providers. The purpose of this paper is to propose a modified approach to the measurement of service quality in a primary health care setting. Design/methodology/approach -Through the use of the HEALTHQUAL scale adapted from the SERVQUAL scale to the context of primary health care centres, the authors measure the perceptions of service quality reported by both users and health centre managers in Spain. Taking service quality to be a construct of a formative nature, the authors propose a modification for its measurement using partial least squares (PLS) path modelling, as recommended in the literature for the modeling of formative constructs. Findings -It is found that the model provides health centre managers with a tool for the measurement of functional quality in their organization. The results reveal the importance of health staff attributes and efficiency measures for the perception of health centre quality.Research limitations/implications -The model can also be used to measure how health care centre managers believe that patients perceive the quality of their service. This allows the potential gap between the provider's view and the customer's view to be assessed and monitored. Originality/value -The paper extends the previous literature in two directions. First, based on SERVQUAL, it presents a general framework for measuring primary health care service quality as a construct of a formative nature. Second, it is the first application of PLS path modeling to the simultaneous examination of both users' and health centre managers' perceptions in a European context.
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