Quality in health care organizationas and measuring perceived service quality

ABSTRACT The growing importance of cost, changing customer attitudes and competition have increased the importance of quality in health care organizations as in other organizations. In today's competitive market; health care organizations should define, measure and evaluate service quality in order to gain superiority and continuity. Nowadays, it is expected to work with minimum cost without considering the quality of the service they provide from the health service providers. It is fact that the patients, who are the biggest external customers of the health care organizations, are not able to chance to evaluate technical quality of the service. They lead to different aspect of quality in health care organizations. Managers and marketing experts in health care organizations focus on patients' perception of service quality, whereas medical professionals focus on technical outputs of service quality. However, current competitive health services market, technical quality is not sufficient for health care organizations to gain superiority. It is the fact that patients are not able to evaluate technical quality at the time they receive the service, increase the importance of functional quality in health care organizations. Besides measuring and evaluating technical quality, the key of a long-lasting success in health care organizations is to measure and evaluate patients' perception of service quality. A widespread scale used for measuring perceived service quality in health care organizations is SERVQUAL. In this study, perceived service quality of Dokuz Eylül University Hospital and Private Altinordu Hospital were assessed by using the adapted form of SERVQUAL for hospital services. Afterwards, the two hospitals were compared with each other according to their perceived quality levels. V