Evaluation of Service Quality of a Saudi Cardiac Center: Patients are the Best Judges!

Dr. Majeda Farajat, Dr. Abdulrahman Mesned

Healthcare sector has lately witnessed growing interest in service quality, which concerns consumers’ perceptions and opinions about the services provided as well as in patient's satisfaction which is a significant outcome indicator of health-care delivery. The objectives of this study were to assess service quality from patients’ perspective using SERVQUAL framework in addition to patients’ overall satisfaction with the provided services. In May 2018, a cross-sectional study in a tertiary referral Cardiac Center –Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was conducted using a systematic random selection method, a total of two hundred (200) adult patients (outpatients=136; inpatients= 64) were recruited. The 40-item questionnaire includedpatients’ socio-demographic characteristics, seven (7) Service Quality Dimensions (SQDs) and patients’ satisfaction. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Mann-Whitney tests, Spearman’s rank correlations and Chi-square tests. The results showed high perceptions of all SQDs, where all median (4.00 to 4.25) and mean scores (4.17 to 4.40) were relatively high. The median and mean scores of patients’ satisfaction were also relatively high, 4.00 and 4.41 respectively. Moreover, Patient’s Satisfaction Rate was 93.5%. No significant differences between outpatients and inpatients in all SQDs or satisfaction levels were found. Additionally, there were significant positive correlations (p≤ .01) between patients’ satisfaction and all SQDs. With the exception of place of residence (p-value=.045), There were no significant differences in the level of satisfaction by patients' socio-demographic characteristics. Our study has shown pleasing levels of patients’ perception of SQDs and satisfaction.Yet, continuous efforts to maintain these levels are required and a special attention should be given to patients coming from outside Qassim region. Methodological limitations to our findings include the possibilityof “ceiling effect” related to the high satisfaction levels; the non-Gaussian distribution of the data, which limited the use of parametric tests.