Measuring service quality in Railway hospitals using the "GAP" model : a study of west central railway

Abstract

Indian railways is one of the largest non military organization in the world providing a comprehensive health care to its employees. Indian railways has an extensive network spread over 63,332 Route Kilo meters, and it ensures health care delivery to all its employees and their dependents including the retired beneficiaries along this network. The railway medical service is delivering a diversified service providing medical care, industrial and occupational health service and Preventive and social health to the organization, my purpose is to study the quality of service delivered by the service providers while performing in this diversified field and measure the level of satisfaction of the patients. West Central Railway is one of the zone of Indian railways that comprised the Jabalpur, Bhopal and Kota divisions. WCR is having two divisional hospitals and one central hospital those are providing health care till the secondary level to its patients. Customer satisfaction is the key factor determining how successful the organization will be in customer relationships (Reichheld, 1996); a good quality product/service leads to a satisfied customer which in turn leads toprofitability. Quality consists of two interdependent parts: quality in fact and quality in perception. The first involves meeting the provider's own expectations (conformance to standards), the second, meeting the expectations of customers. (Omachonu, 1990)Quality, from the health professional's perspective, is technical in nature, and is operationalized in terms of three constructs - structure, process and outcome. However, consumers define service quality in terms of functional quality. This is a pilot study to evaluate the gap between the costumer s expectation and the managers perception of the costumers expectation using a SERVQUAL (Zeithaml, Parasuraman and Berry, 1988) instrument. A questionnaire was designed in English to measure the human aspect of the services like Reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy along with a physical aspect of Tangibles rendered. The service providers taken into consideration are the front line staff providing the service, i.e. the doctors and the nurses and the dressers. The patient group was randomly selected comprising the male and female staff and their families using the hospital services. Only the Group A, Group B and group C employees were taken as the sample. The study is done to find out the level of satisfaction of the patients receiving the services of the railway hospitals. The main focus was on the gap between the service provider s perception of patients expectation and the actual patient expectation and what actually the patients expected and what they actually experienced. The results showed that the service providers overestimated the patient s expectations in all five SERVQUAL dimensions, where as the patients experience in the railway hospitals did not meet their expectations except in the Empathy attribute of SERVQUAL. Hence the administration has to look in to the areas of the short falls to narrow this gap and increase the overall patient satisfaction.