Abstract:

Quality is a high priority topic in healthcare services. After the debates on the implementation of SERVQUAL, the most widely used generic scale to determine service quality, in the healthcare industry, recent studies on service quality focus on the development of industry and culture-specific scales. The initial aim of this study is to develop a model for the conceptualization of healthcare service quality, and then develop a valid and reliable scale that can be used in the measurement of the perceived healthcare service quality of inpatients in Turkish public hospitals through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The study also recommends a method to be used in the model for the prioritization of dimensions. The devised scale was implemented on 268 patients in a public hospital in Eskisehir, Turkey. The output shows that the inpatients rank quality dimensions based on their priorities as staff quality, physical quality and process quality respectively. A 51-item scale has been recommended, as a result of statistical analyses

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