title: Quality determinants and hospital satisfaction. Perceptions of the facility and staff might be key influencing factors.
abstract: Perceptions of service quality ultimately affect consumer satisfaction, but objective measures of quality can be hard to come by when evaluating the quality of clinical care in a hospital. To determine if dimensions other than those found in models such as SERVQUAL were at play, the authors undertook a survey of 472 consumers, who were divided into two groups: those who had been hospital patients within the last three years (users) and those who were visitors (observers). The results suggest that facilities-related and human-factor related considerations helped shape the quality assessments of both groups, with observers generally giving higher marks to the hospitals with which they were familiar on the dimension of facilities-related quality and users expressing a less critical view of the human-factor dimension.
authors.affiliation: Department of Management, Auburn University, AL, USA.
authors.forename: S L
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Oswald
authors.forename: D E
authors.initials: DE
authors.lastname: Turner
authors.forename: R L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Snipes
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Butler
mesh_terms: D019538:Health Care Surveys; D006272:Health Facility Environment; D015285:Hospital-Patient Relations; D006761:Hospitals / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D015146:Midwestern United States; D015279:Organizational Culture; D017060:Patient Satisfaction / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D010361:Patients; D019984:Quality Indicators, Health Care; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D015206:Southwestern United States; D014789:Visitors to Patients