title: Health care quality in NHS hospitals.
abstract: Hospitals provide the same type of service, but they do not all provide the same quality of service. No one knows this better than patients. Reports the results of a market research exercise initiated to ascertain the different factors which patients of health care identify as being necessary to provide error-free service quality in the NHS hospitals. To measure patients' satisfaction with NHS hospitals, the internationally-used market research technique called SERVQUAL was used in order to measure patients' expectations before admission, record their perceptions after discharge from the hospital, and then to close the gap between them. This technique compares expectations with perceptions of service received across five broad dimensions of service quality, namely: tangibility; reliability; responsiveness; assurance; and empathy. This analysis covered 174 patients who had completed the SERVQUAL questionnaire, including patients who had had treatment in surgical, orthopaedic, spinal injury, medicinal, dental and other specialties in the West Midlands region. Recorded the average weighted NHS service quality score overall for the five dimensions as significantly negative.
authors.affiliation: Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital, Oswestry, UK.
authors.forename: F N
authors.initials: FN
authors.lastname: Youssef
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Nel
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Bovaird
mesh_terms: D001071:Appointments and Schedules; D001294:Attitude to Health; D004645:Empathy; D006302:Health Services Research / Q000379:methods; D006779:Hospitals, Public / Q000592:standards*; D008511:Medicine / Q000592:standards; D017060:Patient Satisfaction / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011787:Quality of Health Care; D012107:Research Design; D013038:Specialization; D013222:State Medicine / Q000592:standards; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D006113:United Kingdom; D014850:Waiting Lists