Development of service quality scale for surgical hospitalization.
OBJECTIVE
Findings from literature showed inconsistent results for applying service quality scale in hospitals. Moreover, hospitalization services are provided by diversified departments and a scale designed to measure the overall hospitalization quality is difficult and capturing special characteristics of different departments is also not an easy task. This study attempted to develop a service quality scale for surgical hospitalization (SQSH).


METHODS
Forty-two items were designed via literature review, interviews with patients, health professionals and experienced care givers. A cross-sectional survey was conducted in one hospital. A total of 271 patients in surgical wards were chosen using stratified random sampling; 57.7% of the sampled patients were aged below 55, and 52.2% were male.


RESULTS
The response rate was 93.4%. Twenty-nine items were retained through the scale development process and six factors were formed: needs management, assurance, sanitation, customization, convenience and quiet, and attention. Six factors explained 57.3% of total variance. Five experts assessed the content validity; content validity index was 0.964. Furthermore, all Cronbach's alpha exceeded 0.642 and all factor loadings exceeded 0.5. The concurrent validity correlation was 0.583, which had a p value below 0.01.


CONCLUSIONS
The SQSH has sufficient usefulness, reliability and validity. Future research on service quality can apply the SQSH scale to link with utilization intention and patient loyalty and attempt to develop a hospitalization quality scale for other departments.
Teng
Ching-I
CI
Department of Business Administration, Chang Gung University, Tainan, Taiwan.
Ing
Ching-Kang
CK
Chang
Hao-Yuan
HY
Chung
Kuo-Piao
KP
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006761:Hospitals / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D017060:Patient Satisfaction; D019984:Quality Indicators, Health Care; D011787:Quality of Health Care; D013514:Surgical Procedures, Operative; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013624:Taiwan