Service quality has been identified as important factor in determining satisfaction in various fields including healthcare service. This study adopts the most widely service model SERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al., 1985) to examine its impact on satisfaction with healthcare service from patients’ perspectives since most previous researches are conducted from medical providers’ perspectives in emergency healthcare.

Patients in the emergency healthcare mostly are due to acute and sudden nature of their problems, resulting a higher level of stress and anxiety. They expect to receive timeless care for their illness and rely on and trust the knowledge and expertise of healthcare providers that their illness could be cured. That is, in emergency healthcare, the professional ability, trust and interaction between healthcare center and patient (i.e., assurance and responsiveness of SERVQUAL) are more important to patients in emergency healthcare. Accordingly, we hypothesize that assurance responsiveness are relatively more important to patients’ satisfaction with emergency healthcare.

Questionnaire measuring SERVQUAL and satisfaction with emergency healthcare was adapted from previous research. 169 questionnaires were collected from patients. Both reliability and validity meet recommended criteria. The results of stepwise regression indicate that assurance is the most important factor to satisfaction with emergency healthcare, followed by responsiveness, empathy, and reliability, in that order. Hypotheses are supported.

The results of this provide valuable insight for enhancing medical healthcare. For future research, researchers can look into patients with different degree of illness might have different perspectives on the services dimensions in emergency healthcare.

Authors:
Chia-Chang Chuang, Kaohsiung Show Chwan Memorial Hospital, Taiwan
Mengkuan Lai, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan

About the Presenter(s)
Chia-Chuan Chuang, deputy superintendent of Kaohsiung Show Chwan Memorial Hospital, Taiwan.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Monday Schedule

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