Quality gap in primary healthcare services in Bandar Abbas: women's perspective

The Service quality gap is the gap between customer expectations and the perceived quality of the service delivered. The basic step in eliminating this gap is recognizing customers’ perceptions and expectations of service quality and determining the quality gap. The aim of this study was to determine the quality gap in primary healthcare services in the health centers of Bandar Abbas.

This was a cross-sectional study and the target population consisted of women attending the health care centers of Bandar Abbas. We selected a total of 400 women according to the order of theire attendance. The SERVQUAL measurement instrument was used to determine the gap in service quality. The instrument comprises five dimensions: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. Data were analyzed by the SPSS software.

There were quality gaps in all the five dimensions of service quality. The smallest gap (-0.76) was in the assurance and the greatest gap was observed for the empathy (-0.98). There were significant differences between the mean of service quality gap in all dimensions (P<0.0001).

The negative gap in service quality indicates that client expectations are higher than their perceptions. Thus, there is a need for improvement across all the five dimensions.