Measuring quality of services in Tehran teaching hospitals using HEALTHQUAL instrument

Enhancing patients’ satisfaction through providing high quality services is an important goal of a hospital. This study aimed to measure services quality of Tehran teaching hospitals in 2015.
This descriptive and cross sectional study was carried out in seven teaching hospitals in Tehran, Iran. Hospital services quality was measured using HEALTHQUAL questionnaire by asking 296 patients selected through stratified random sampling. Data was analyzed using SPSS-V20 software. Wilcoxon, U-Man Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis statistical tests were applied.
The mean score of patient perception and expectation were 3.49 and 4.10 out of 5 score, respectively. There was a negative gap (-.58) between perception and expectation of patients. Services quality ratio was 0.85. Patients were most satisfied with hospital staff competencies (3.97±0.82) and least satisfied with hospital amenities (3.05±0.94). There were significant relationship between hospital service quality and patient age, education and place of residence (p There was a negative gap in services quality of the studied hospitals. Hospital managers can improve service quality using appropriate quality management strategies through improving hospitals’ structures and processes.