DUAL SIDES OF HEALTH CARE SERVICE QUALITY: WHAT IS REALLY IMPORTANT FOR PATIENTS?

Abstract

Marketers always try to identify those service aspects that bring the biggest customer satisfaction. As long as health care service providers began to realise that patients should be treated as customers, they face the need to understand, what service aspects are the most important to patients. There is no arguing that the most important thing for patients when talking about health care services is good health outcomes. But there are plenty of evidences, that patients do not have competence for evaluating technical quality that in health care service sector in fact means the outcomes of treatment, medical treatment, professional knowledge and skills of physicians, etc. Because of that analysis in this article concentrates only to those health care service quality aspects that could be easily evaluated by patients: service environment or tangible aspects (where the service is provided) and interpersonal aspects (how the service is provided), thus maintaining the purpose to explore the duality of the patients’ view to service quality of health care organizations.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.em.18.1.4233