Assessing Medical Tourism Services Quality Using SERVQUAL Model: A Patient's Perspective

Area of Science:

• Healthcare Management
• Medical Tourism
• Service Quality Assessment

Background:

• Continuous quality improvement is crucial for the medical tourism industry.
• Assessing various dimensions of hospital service quality is essential for enhancing medical tourism.
• This study aimed to evaluate medical tourism service quality in private and public hospitals.

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine and compare the service quality of medical tourism in private and public hospitals.
• To identify specific dimensions of service quality that require improvement for foreign patients.

Main Methods:

• A cross-sectional study involving 250 Iraqi tourists in Ahvaz private and public hospitals (2015).
• Data collected using a validated Medical Tourism SERVQUAL questionnaire (MTSQ) with 8 dimensions and 31 items.
• Statistical analysis included Mann-Whitney, Kruskal-Wallis, and Wilcoxon tests.

Main Results:

• A negative service quality gap was observed across all dimensions in both hospital types (P>0.001).
• The largest quality gap was in "exchange and travel facilities" (-2.63), while "tangibles" showed the smallest gap (-0.68).
• The average patient age was 39 years, with an average hospital stay of 3.87 days.

Conclusions:

• All studied hospitals exhibited a negative gap in all service quality dimensions.
• Enhancing hospital services quality is necessary to attract and retain foreign patients in medical tourism.
• Specific focus on improving travel and exchange facilities is recommended.