Development of service quality scale for surgical hospitalization

Background/Purpose: Findings from literature showed inconsistent results for applying service quality scale in hospitals. Moreover, hospitalization services are provided by diversified departments and a scale designed to measure the overall hospitalization quality is difficult and capturing special characteristics of different departments is also not an easy task. This study attempted to develop a service quality scale for surgical hospitalization (SQSH). Methods: Forty-two items were designed via literature review, interviews with patients, health professionals and experienced care givers. A cross-sectional survey was conducted in one hospital. A total of 271 patients in surgical wards were chosen using stratified random sampling; 57.7% of the sampled patients were aged below 55, and 52.2% were male. Results: The response rate was 93.4%. Twenty-nine items were retained through the scale development process and six factors were formed: needs management, assurance, sanitation, customization, convenience and quiet, and attention. Six factors explained 57.3% of total variance. Five experts assessed the content validity; content validity index was 0.964. Furthermore, all Cronbach's α exceeded 0.642 and all factor loadings exceeded 0.5. The concurrent validity correlation was 0.583, which had a p value below 0.01. Conclusion: The SQSH has sufficient usefulness, reliability and validity. Future research on service quality can apply the SQSH scale to link with utilization intention and patient loyalty and attempt to develop a hospitalization quality scale for other departments.