American International Journal of Social Science

Empirical Validation of Patient’s Expectation and Perception of Service Quality in Ghanaian Hospitals: an Integrated Model Approach
Mary Ann Yeboah, Mary Opokua Ansong, Francis Appau-Yeboah, Henry Asante Antwi, Ethel Yiranbon

Abstract
Hospitals as organisations (whether for profit or not) are subject to the same processes of sustainability and strategic management partly as objects and victims but also as beneficiaries of sustainable business enterprises. Their position is locked within the national systems to supply the healthy human resources needed for sustainable development. No matter the time of day, hospital staff and physicians must be prepared for anything including the treatment of common colds to life-threatening diseases through to providing aid when emergency occurs such as disaster relief. Using the SERVQUAL model with the Kano model, this study aims to prioritize above all the use of various medical service technical items as an improvement directed towards hospitals’ competitiveness. With the outpatient services of a hospital as the empirical case study, we first collected the service requirements of the patients and classified them using the Kano model to decide the weights of each patient’s service requirements, then found out the different medical service technical items which the hospital provided to satisfy the service requirements. This p a p e r identifies t h e ma i n a t t r i b u t e s i n t h e h e a l t h c a r e as an empirics research subject for the purpose of patient satisfaction improvement. Practitioners in hospital management need to consider that the relationship between performance of attributes and patient satisfaction depends on the classification of attributes. This research also contributes to our understanding of the complexity of the healthcare service, and reveals shifts in categories over time and with patient and management experience. As competitive forces continue to pressure imitation and innovation, both in the ways a specific interactive attribute is executed as well as in the adding of new attributes, the hospital management must continuously monitor their service and patient satisfaction relationship in order to implement changes that will strengthen the relationship with hospital staff

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