THE EVALUATION OF OUTPATIENT QUALITY SERVICES IN PHYSIOTHERAPY IN THE TEACHING HEALTH CENTERS OF SHAHID BEHESHTI UNIVERSITY BASED ON SERVQUAL TOOLS (Published)
Introduction: Service quality plays an important role in industrial services such as banks, hospitals, clinics, transportation and so forth. Such quality is, also, prominent with respect to meeting customers’ satisfaction and providing sufficient grounds for organizational survival. This study aims to investigate the quality of outpatient services in physiotherapy in the teaching health centers of Shahid Beheshti University based on SERVQUAL tools. Methodology: The current study is regarded as cross-sectional. Moreover, the data of this research were collected and analyzed in 2015. The participants of this study consisted of patients in the teaching health centers of Shahid Beheshti University. Furthermore, the standard questionnaire of SERVQUAL (1988) which enjoys high levels of reliability and validity was utilized in this research. Last but not least, t-test, Paired t-test and Friedman test were calculated though SPSS software for analyzing the data. Findings: The results of the present study indicate that all the dimensions of service quality in the centers under study were reported to be at the optimum level. Also, a significant difference between perceptions and expectations of patients based on five dimensions of service quality were reported to be tangible factors, assurance, responsiveness, empathy, and reliability in the centers under study. The patients regarded assurance dimension as the most significant with the score of 4.88 and considered physical factors as the least significant with the score of 2.21.Conclusions: Nowadays, managers need to be informed of their hospitals’ functioning. Through using these tools optimally, managers are enabled to evaluate service quality from the customer’s perspective so that they are equipped with critical eyes to distinguish their weaknesses and to try to ameliorate them.
Keywords: Customer Satisfaction, SERVQUAL, Service Quality, physiotherapy services