An Investigation of Service Quality—Willingness to Recommend Relationship across Patient and Hospital Characteristics

Abstract

This study investigates onto which dimensions of service quality have more impact on patients’ overall quality perceptions of a hospital and seeks to determine the nature of relationship between service quality and patients’ willingness to recommend a hospital to their friends and family. The study also uncovers if the levels of service quality and recommendation behaviours and the relationship between service quality and recommendation behaviour exhibit similar patterns among male versus female, black versus white patients and small/medium versus large hospitals. Data gathered via mail questionnaires and phone interviews from a large sample of the patients of a hospital system in the Southern United States serve as the study setting. Results are presented and their implications are discussed. Avenues for future research are offered.

Perspectives of Nurses Toward Telehealth Efficacy and Quality of Health Care: Pilot Study (Preprint)

“…These values demonstrate that the expectations (E) of telehealth nursing service are higher than the actual perception (P) of the service [ Table 3]. The gap scores are positive in the reliability (8)(9)(10)(11)(12) and empathy (21-25) dimensions, which means that the performance in reliability is more than expectations. This has a positive effect on the level of the nursing services within the telehealth provider system based on the incorporation of telehealth nursing services.…”

“…Additionally, the service quality items consisting of tangibles (TA), empathy (EM), assurance (AS), reliability (RL), and responsiveness (RS) are the dimensions measured by the SERVQUAL instrument [9]. These are also applicable to the measurement of telehealth nursing service quality [11,12].In this study, the SERVQUAL instrument is modified and utilized to measure TNSQ [9] [ Table 1]. The SERVQUAL dimensions developed [9] and revised for this telehealth nursing service quality study are described below [ Table 1].…”

“…Past studies have been conducted to determine the quality attributes for telemedicine services from the patient and physician perspective [18,19]. There is a need to further investigate the quality attributes for telemedicine services from the nurse perspective, which hasn't been clearly defined before [5,12].TNSQ survey contains questions belonging to the five dimensions [9,11][Multimedia Appendix A].The gap method of subtracting nurses' expectations from perceptions, in each of the dimensions (using the survey),helps in assessing the TNSQ [9].The dimensions having the negative gap score indicate that there is a barrier or an inhibitor present in that dimension, in the same manner a positive value indicates that there is a facilitator in that dimension. The current study presented here addresses this gap in our understanding of telehealth care by developing concepts and empirically assessing telehealth nursing service quality.…”

“…The modified SERVQUAL instrument consisted of 25 items, which included the five original dimensions. The first seven questions belonged to the tangibles dimension (1-7), questions eight to twelve belonged to the reliability dimension (8)(9)(10)(11)(12), questions thirteen to sixteen belonged to the responsiveness dimension (13)(14)(15)(16), questions seventeen to twenty belonged to the assurance dimension (17)(18)(19)(20), and the last five questions belonged to the empathy dimension (21-25).…”

“…Third, it establishes how telehealth provides daily monitoring of patient health, which has benefits of immediate feedback for patients, family, and caregivers as well as convenience of scheduling. Quality of service is essential for the telehealth performance and viability of the service; therefore it is important to assess the service quality of all involved medical fields as well as the telehealth nursing process [6,12].…”