Service Quality in Emergency Departments of the Public and Private Hospitals from the Patient's Perspective

Patient's perspective of service quality has attracted much attention for evaluating service quality in recent years. Therefore, the objective of this study was to compare the quality of services offered in emergency departments of public and private hospitals affiliated to Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences (SBMU) in Tehran 2015, from the patients’ perception.
Material and In this cross-sectional study, 373 discharged patients from four public and four private hospitals were selected by convenient sampling method. A validated questionnaire consisted of 20 items, was used for data collection. For data analysis, descriptive statistics, Mann-Whitney and regression tests were used through SPSS.22 Software.
Two factors such as patient's education before discharge and prompt attention received in the emergency wards, had the lowest scores and considered as weaknesses of service quality. Quality of basic amenities, and patient care received the highest scores and ranked as strengths of emergency department service quality. The mean score of service quality was (4.3) in private hospitals, which was higher than public hospitals (3.9); and this difference was statistically significant (p Service quality of emergency department in private hospitals was better than public hospitals. The hospital management should pay more attention to the aspects of services such as patient education before discharge and fast delivery of services. Providing patients with educational booklet at discharge and telephone tracking, and reducing waiting times through re-engineering of patient care processes, are recommended to improve satisfaction of the patients.