Service Quality in Health Care Centres: An Empirical Study
Dr. Sumathi Kumaraswamy

Abstract
In today’s highly competitive environment, Health care centers realize the importance of service quality as a measure to improve their competitive position. Consumer’s perceptions about the health care services play an important role when choosing a hospital. In this paper, the service quality in corporate and non-corporate health care centers has been measured. Actually, this research work is the extension of the research work done by Sharma and Chahal, 2003 and Chahal and Sharma, 2004. The well-documented ‘Service Quality model’ was used as a conceptual framework for understanding service quality delivery in health care centers. An analysis covering a sample of 2.00 patients from corporate and non-corporate health care centers. The analysis revealed that the important service quality factors in health care centers are physician behaviour, supportive staff, atmospherics and operational performance. The corporate health care centre are highly rated them the non corporate health centers regarding all service quality factors. The perception on service quality factors in health care centers has a significant and positive impact on the patients’ perception on the overall performance of the health care centre. The important discriminant service quality factors among the two type of health care centre are atmospherics and supportive staffs. The study suggests improvement across all service quality factors and formulation of suitable strategies for enhancing patients’ satisfaction.

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