Quality determinants and hospital satisfaction. Perceptions of the facility and staff might be key influencing factors

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.