Title: Prioritisation of service quality dimensions for healthcare sector

Authors: Rafikul Islam; Selim Ahmed; Kazi Md. Tarique

Addresses: Department of Business Administration, Faculty of Economics of Management Sciences, International Islamic University Malaysia, Jalan Gombak, 53100 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia ' Department of Business Administration, Faculty of Economics of Management Sciences, International Islamic University Malaysia, Jalan Gombak, 53100 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia ' Department of Business Administration, Faculty of Economics of Management Sciences, International Islamic University Malaysia, Jalan Gombak, 53100 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Abstract: Due to the unique nature among the service industries, the overriding objective of the healthcare sector is to provide error free, impeccable services to their patients and clientele. It is not an option rather a norm for the healthcare sector to uphold and maintain the level of service that is quintessential and benchmark in the service industries. However, service quality has different meanings to different people. In this paper, SERVQUAL has been considered as the main tool to measure service quality and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been applied to prioritise the five dimensions of SERVQUAL for healthcare sector. In addition to this, AHP has been applied to prioritise the various items representing each of the dimensions. The results show that Reliability and Assurance are the two most important service quality dimensions in the healthcare sector. The priorities of dimensions and their items are also determined with respect to a selected demographic factors on the part of the respondents.

Keywords: service quality dimensions; healthcare services; prioritisation; analytical hierarchy process; AHP; SERVQUAL; reliability; quality assurance; QA.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMEI.2016.075751

International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics, 2016 Vol.8 No.2, pp.108 - 123

Received: 12 May 2015
Accepted: 24 Oct 2015
Published online: 01 Apr 2016 *

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