Development of service quality scale for surgical hospitalization

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).

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.

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.

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.