*Associate Professor, Department of Business and Financial Studies, University of Kashmir, Srinagar- 190006
**Assistant Professor, Islamia College of Science and Commerce, Srinagar- 190006
Online published on 30 September, 2013.
In today's highly competitive healthcare environment, service quality and patient satisfaction have become critical for any healthcare organisation seeking to carve out a competitive advantage. This is because in a competitive environment, as the race to compete intensifies, business firms discover their offerings becoming dangerously similar to one another. Under such circumstances patient's decision to patronize one and not the other is based on quality service offered to him. Patient-based determinants and perceptions of service quality, therefore, play an important role when choosing a hospital. This paper attempted to determine the expectations and perceptions of patients of four hospitals in J&K State and Chandigarh (Punjab) through the use of a self developed and statistically tested research instrument. Based on data gathered from five hundred twenty (520) patients, the study concludes that there is an overall service quality gap between patients’ expectations and perceptions and suggests improvements across all the six dimensions particularly on Nursing Care and Treatment Results to improve the overall quality of medical services.
