Health services marketing patient satisfaction: An application

Healthcare sector has recently been in a progressive transformation. With the improvement in science and technology and growing in importance given to human-being and cultural level, it becomes a necessity that healthcare services should be provided with high-standards.Healthcare services are one of the indicators of the development level of countries in terms of socio-economic level. The main purpose of healthcare services is to provide health services, to meet the needs of society, in time, in the proper location and with the lowest cost by avoiding the extra expenditures. To do so, marketing of healthcare services should be effectively implemented. Marketing healthcare services - in a form to increase the satisfaction and pleasure of patients taking service in hospitals - underlines the physical and environmental conditions of hospitals, determines how the attitudes and behaviours of doctors, nurses and other staff should be and how patient admission process and polyclinic services would be carried out, then it analyses all these processes, defines the problems and comes up with solutions about them. Today, since human's awareness increases in healthcare, their demand of quality care spreads and their preferences on health institutions become more selective when they are in need of healthcare service, these lead to a more competitive understanding among healthcare institutions. Another factor to contribute this competitiveness is the constant increase of the healthcare institutions and their necessity to survive in this atmosphere. In order them to survive, make profit and compete among each other, they should give importance the style of the services given and the pleasure of patients that take service from them. This turns out to be the most distinguishing factor among the competing institutions. This thesis was prepared for the purpose of emphasizing medical services, marketing healthcare services, patient satisfaction and pleasure and the significance of all these factors, increasing the satisfaction and pleasure of customers (patients) to a high level, measuring the pleasure of customers about the services they take during the marketing of healthcare services and determining whether customers vary in terms of their demographic features. In the study, at first, literature search was conducted about the concepts of healthcare services, marketing healthcare services and pleasure and satisfaction of patients. In the final part of the study, the analysis results of the questionnaire conducted were given and assessed. The questionnaire was practised on the polyclinic patients in a private sector hospital in Şahinbey in Gaziantep city. Keywords: Health, Healthcare Services, Marketing Healthcare Services, Patient Satisfaction, Patient Pleasure.