Investigating the Relationship between Service Quality Dimensions and Accreditation Results (Case Study: Khorasan Razavi Hospitals)

Healthcare organizations today are facing important opportunities and challenges due to the increasing of awareness and people’s expectations about the quality of health services and creating competition in service delivery. Hence, most health care managers and policy makers in the field of health consider standardization and evaluation of health service providers as an inevitable issue to improve the quality. In this regard, there are different assessment models, of which accreditation model is frequently selected by healthcare leaders as a method to improve quality and is an integral part of healthcare systems in many countries. Since the year 2012, this standard was formulated and communicated to hospitals in Iran for implementation. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between service quality dimensions and accreditation results.
The study population included all patients admitted to Razavi Khorasan hospitals grades A, B and C classifications. From the 46 hospitals in Khorasan Razavi, 13 hospitals have received grade , 19 hospitals received grade A and 14 hospitals received grade B or C of the accreditation standards. By Using Cochran’s formula, 384 patients were chosen as sample. In this study the Parasuraman standard questionnaire was used to collect the quality of service data that obtained the reliability of 0.85 and validating the results of secondary data (obtained from hospitals in the evaluation conducted by the Ministry of Health). SPSS software was used to conduct multiple regression analysis
The results of the analysis showed confidence, reliability, responsiveness, and empathy tangible, respectively with coefficients of 0.63, 0.47, 0.42, 0.36 and 0.29 along with a significant positive correlation with the results of accreditation.
The results suggest that in order to improve accreditation rating, the hospitals must pay attention to the reliability, reliability, responsiveness, and empathy tangible components.