Prioritizing the patient's expectations of hospital service quality through using AHP(Case study: public hospital in Bandar Abbas)

The main mission of hospital is to promote care quality for patients and to meet their needs and expectations. The present study aims at identifying and prioritizing the patients’ expectations of the hospital services quality, which is considered to be the first step toward accomplishing such an important mission. The present study is descriptive and applied. The data was collected through pairwise comparisons questionnaire that was distributed among 150 patients in a public hospital in Bandar Abbas, 104 patients filled out the questionnaire. The obtained data were analyzed by the use of AHP. The results show that among the different dimensions of hospital service quality investigated in the present study, the patients listed 5 main dimensions in order of priority: accessibility (0.251), medical services(0.232), environment(0.202), administration(0.160), and relation(0.155). Among different criteria, access to medicine and blood(0.054) was the first priority and attention to the patient(0.010) was the low priority. Due to the key role of the patients in defining and assessment of service quality, the present study presents a framework for evaluation of hospital service quality according which the priorities of patients were determined. The managers are advised to prioritize the quality improvement practices based on the patients’ priorities in order to satisfy the patients and make the processes customer-oriented.