Measurement of perceptions and expectations of service quality in public and private hospitals

In the present situation, healthcare is very important to each and every people because they have to live without any illness. Treatment cannot be given in a patient's house or in the clinic. This is possible only in a hospital, for it consists of large number of professionally and technically skilled people who apply their knowledge and skill with the help of world-class expertise, advanced sophisticated equipments and appliances. This article examines that the service quality measurement of perceptions and expectations in the two hospitals. SERVQUAL model has been used to measure the service quality which was developed by Parasuraman, Zeithmal and Berry. For this study, two questionnaires were developed, one for measuring the levels of expectations and other for measuring the perceptions of service quality. In these two hospitals, samples of 400 in-patients (each having 200 samples) are selected to measure the patients’ perception of service quality based on convenience sampling. The result indicates that the perceived service of the public hospital is much lower than the expected service. But in the case of private hospital, the perceived service quality is much higher than the expected service.