Journal of School of Public Health and

Measuring of service quality is the basic prerequisite for improving quality. Patients&apos expectations and perceptions of service quality play an important role in the choice of hospital, loyalty to organization and behavioral intention. A first step towards improvement would be to determine areas of quality that are most defective. Studies show that consumers are in close contact with service providers, and they are involved in the service process. Therefore, this group can measure services quality better than any other group. This study was conducted to measure service quality based on patients&apos expectations and perceptions in Zanjan hospitals.
The cross-sectional design was used in this research. For data collection, SERVQUAL questionnaire was employed. To ensure the reliability of the questionnaire, the internal consistency reliability test (Cronbach alpha) was performed.
Findings: Cronbach alpha for service quality was .94. Results show that the assurance (knowledge, experience and ability to maintain patients&apos confidence and trust) was rated as the most important dimension. (SQ mean = -1.3). There were differences between patients&apos expectations and perceptions in all the dimensions.
the assurance dimension constitutes the most serious problem facing hospitals. It is recommended that physicians thoroughly explain the disease condition to patients, and that patients should be treated with dignity and respect.

  Background and Aim: Quality measurement and management has changed to be one of the most important topics in health care today. This study aims to analyze service quality through Importance-performance Analysis tool in selected hospitals.

  Materials and Methods : This is an Analytical-descriptive study. Research community was all admitted patients to four hospitals during a specific period, the sample of the study consists of 284 inpatient person selected by stratified random sampling method. The main instrument was a questionnaire consists of two parts "importance" and "performance" with the same items in 8 dimensions. Assigning the scores for each of those service items in a two-dimensional diagram with four cell, each gives special guideline for hospitals. SPSS 17.0 for windows was employed for the scale measurement.

  Results: The results of the study indicate that the most important dimensions in patients attribute with 3.55 mean were for "accountability" and the best performance in patients point of view was for "responsiveness" and "reliability". The key dissatisfier with least importance and performance score was for "service organization" with the mean of 3.11.

  In analyzing service quality, reliability, empathy, assurance and accountability dimensions were located in Cell I, service process was located in Cell II, service organization was located in Cell III and finally tangibles and responsiveness dimensions were located in Cell IV.

  Conclusion: Application of IPA to these data showed that developing service process management system in order to improve process of service delivering is important directions for hospitals to work on.