Exploring Quality Perceptions of Health Care Operations

Abstract

Patient care has become increasingly important in the health care environment of Mauritius. Patients' satisfaction and their expectations of health care are valid indicators of quality health care. The present paper reports the results of a survey of patient satisfaction with heath care, administered by face-to-face interview to 300 in-patient adults discharged from five main regional hospitals based in Mauritius. It examines the predictors and level of patients' satisfaction across the five regional hospitals of Mauritius. In this study, a modified version of HEALTHQUAL scale was used for determining patient satisfaction with health care in the regional public hospitals. Multiple regression analysis was conducted to understand the relationships among patients' perceptions of in-patient services and their overall perceptions of health care quality, and also satisfaction with their care and willingness to return or recommend the same hospital's services to others. The dimensions labelled as "Patients' perceptions of ward/hospital environment" and "Patients' perceptions of medical and nursing staff" served a significant impact on nearly all measures of patient satisfaction in the regional public hospitals of Mauritius.

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

“…Our finding concerning the positive relationship between overall service quality and recommendation behaviour is also constant with prior research (e.g., Juwaheer & Kassean, 2006;Westbrook et al, 2014). It is also important to note that while there is some variation, the proportion of explained variance for OQ and RECOM consistently remain above 50 per cent across all group comparisons.…”

“…Perhaps, more importantly, nurses who work in the high-contact, emotionally-charged hospital environment, as a result of their interaction with patients, significantly influence patients' evaluation of the hospital service (Flinkman, Laine, Leino-Kilpi, Hasselhorn & Salanterä, 2008;Yavas, Karatepe & Babakus, 2014). Nurses are in a position of trust, often as confidant and at times as surrogate family or friend (Juwaheer & Kassean, 2006) to patients who are under pain and/or stress.…”

Service Quality and Re-visit Intention

“…The study found that socio-economic factors such as income, education and occupation affect the choice of health care services and the fact that customers prefer private health care facilities due to the poor performance of the public health care system. Juwaheer and Kassean (2006) examine the predictors and level of patients' satisfaction across the five regional hospitals of Mauritius with a view to provide a tool to improve the quality of public health care services. The authors propose that patient satisfaction with health care is influenced by seven dimensions of service quality, namely admission to hospital, attitude of medical staff, attitude of nursing staff, hospital physical environment, patient amenities, and discharge planning and coordination procedures.…”

“…Patient satisfaction and perceived quality are positively and strongly related in a health care setting and are good indicators of health care quality (Juwaheer and Kassean 2006). Since conventional methods of marketing and promotion have outcomes that are different in the health care sector than in the case of manufactured goods and services such as banking and insurance, and hospitality services (such as hotel and restaurant industry, travel and tourism), word-of-mouth plays a key role in the choice of a particular hospital (Sivakumar and Srinivasan 2010).…”

Why do some hospital leaders “speak no evil” about their organizations' medical errors?

“…With a Cronbach alpha of .97, HealthQual conceptualizes hospital quality as multidimensional, including admissions, physicians, nurses, ward, amenities, and discharge (Juwaheer & Kassean, 2006). Each of the instrument's six dimension scores (ranging from 1 to 5) are summed, producing an overall HealthQual index ranging from 6 to 30.…”