MEASURING SERVICE QUALITY AT BINH PHUOC HOSPITAL- A DIMENSION-BY-DIMENSION ANALYSIS

Service quality is still a new concept to those working in health care services since it has not been identified as a mandatory factor to increase competitiveness. Although Bình Phước Hospital has implemented a survey on patients’ comments, the result has not yet reflected the comprehensive service quality given by the hospital. The research aims to conduct an assessment on service quality at Bình Phước Hospital based on the model of SERVQUAL under the form of dimension-by-dimension analysis. The outcome would help the management to have a clear and full picture about the current service quality. Consequently, recommendations will be provided according to the findings.


INTRODUCTION Background
During the past five years, the living standard of Vietnamese people has been significantly increasing.Vietnam is considered as emerging economy of Asia Pacific.Service sectors have started to be shaped and grown so fast, in which health care service becomes more and more important.However, it can be seen that the current capability of hospitals does not meet the high demand of patients in Vietnam.Regarding health care service in Vietnam, "service quality" is a relatively new academic phrase.An understanding, and measurement, of service quality has been aware and evaluated by the patient is very crucial and essential for the hospitals to recognize the current level of service provided and whether current service quality meet patients' expectations.
Binh Phuoc General Hospital is based in Dong Xoai town, Binh Phuoc province.
Established since 1999, the hospital now has seven departments and twenty medical wards with total employees of 546.The bed capacity of the hospital reaches 450 beds with the total of inpatients of 31,277 and 37,246 in 2007and 2008respectively (Binh Phuoc Hospital, 2008).
The research aims to assess the current service quality at Binh Phuoc Province General Hospital basing on SERVQUAL model, to explore patients' expectations on service quality at internal medical ward of Binh Phuoc Province General Hospital.

THEORY BASE OF SERVICE
QUALITY Science & Technology Development, Vol 13, No.Q1-2010 Trang 32

Characteristics of Services
Many definitions of service are defined and most of all contain a common theme of intangibility and simultaneous consumption.To make it simple, "services are deeds, processes, and performances" (Zeithaml & Bitner, 2000).

Definition of service quality
Service quality is a highly abstract construct, where all the characteristics are different to goods.Service quality based on perception concept is developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml andBerry (1985, 1988) in a way of five gaps.They proposed SERVQUAL model in which service quality is a function of the differences between expectation and performance along the quality dimensions.They developed the gap model in which they defined perceived service quality "as the degree and direction of the discrepancy between consumers' perceptions and expectations".The model predicted that perceive service quality could be quantified by the measurement of subtracting the consumers' rating perception of service quality (P) and their rating expectation of service quality (E) calculated as Service Quality = P -E.

Measuring Service Quality
The  Similarly, perceived data was applied to the scale reliability check.Cronbach's alpha were almost high and above 0.7.

Gap between customer expectation and perception
In There is no statement of how a gap score is considered high, especially when using the 1-5 Likert scale system from the previous researches (Parasuraman et al, 1988, Ziethaml et al., 1988, 2000, Karen, 1988, Hoffman & Bateson, 2000).Let's assume that the gap score of under 0.5 (less than 10% oh the highest score of 5) is low, the gap score from 0.5 to 1 is acceptable, from 1 to 1.5 is rather high, from 1.5 to 2 is high, over 2 is too high (the service quality is performed poorly).
In general, we got the negative score for all gaps between perception and expectation on all dimensions, the average gap score is -0.8129, which can be considered acceptable for the overall service quality.The result shows that the three factors "Responsiveness", "Reliability" and "Assurance" have scores higher than -0.8 (-0.85, -0.84 and -0.82 respectively), whereas the other two "Tangibles" and "Empathy" have scores lower than -0.8 (-0.76, and -0.79 respectively).All are in the range of acceptable.
or in short Q = P -E, each service quality aspect is analyzed to providing the research results.Then the dimension-by-dimension analysis is conducted.

Table 2 .
Descriptive Statistics of Perception

Table 3 .
Gap between customer expectation and perception