Measurement of service quality in health-care sector: Application of servqual method in Celal Bayar University Hospital

Today service sector is one of the most developing investment areas. On the other hand quality is a concept, which is gaining importance since the 2oth century. Various researches about quality are available in the literature. Service sector is newly developin Therefore, quality improvement has become important in this sector g. at the end of 20" and at the beginning of 21'' centuries. Today in sectors such as health-care, education, airlines, banking and retailing; the importance of measuring quality for the development of the sector, has been understood by the top managers and the methods measuring quality has started to be applied. In this study the importance of quality has been mentioned. Service as a concept has started to become important first in USA in 1990 and spread throughout the world. Various definitions are given in the literature on service and some of them have become universal and were accepted by most researchers. Later on. the features of the service conc.e~ hta ve been determined. The service sector has been affected by the rise of competition and as a competitive advantage quality improvement has become essential. Moreover, because of the direct transactions between .pa tients and the doctors, nurses and personnel, it is more necessary to improve quality in the healthcare sector. In this study the definitions of service concept has been given, application of sewice quality on service sector has been discussed and quality in health-care sector was investigated. Servqual is a universally accepted service quality measurement instrument. This instrument was first set forth by Parasuraman, Zeithalm and Berry. This method measures quality by subtracting the customers' expectations from their perceptions of quality after receiving service. Servqual instrument is the main subject of this study. Application of Servqual in various sectors has been examined thoroughly. Finally Servqual was applied in health-care sector. By distribution of questionnaires in Celal Bayar University Hospital in Manisa, the question of how well the received service satisfies the expectations of patients would be answered. Key Words: SERVQUAL, service sector, quality in service sector, measurement of quality in health-care sector.