A critical evaluation of quality management-a case study of Aninwah Medical Centre
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Date
2008-08-24
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Abstract
Hospitals across the country are searching for ways to improve quality of care and promote effective quality improvement strategies. Competitiveness and search for profits have called more attention towards customer's satisfaction and increased researchers' interest on the topic of hospital service quality. In this context, this study applies to SERVQUAL for critically evaluating service quality management in hospitals. The main objective is to find out the motivation and hindrances to hospital quality to both managers ? and employees and finally to assess quality service dimensions that are delivered through the perspectives of employees and customers. •
This work was performed at Aninwah Medical Centre (AMC) a private hospital located at Emena in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. The studied hospital runs mainstream hospital activities in medicine and surgery. A questionnaire was developed based on the motivations, hindrances and quality dimensions on hospital quality and sent to the Top Managers, employees and customers for gathering data, from which results were analyzed. The results of this study showed that Top Managers perceive protection from unsafe care, employee satisfaction and to gain competitive advantage as the highest motivators to Quality Management. What serves as motivation to employees is first monetary reward reinforced by customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and then to gain recognition. Almost all respondents asserted that the following obstacles hinder
Quality Management: resistance to change, inadequate tools, and poor internal
communication. Under the quality dimensions that call managerial attention, assurance
was found the most relevant to both employees and customers. The relative order of
importance of the service dimensions to internal customers was found to have: Assurance being the first, followed by Responsiveness, Empathy, Tangibles, and lastly followed by Reliability. To external customers the relative order of importance of the service dimensions was found to also have: Assurance being the first, followed by Empathy, Reliability, Responsiveness and lastly by Tangibles.
The paper concludes that there are differences among the relative perspectives of service quality between employees and customers with regard to quality dimensions and suggests further work to continue this research.
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A thesis submitted to the College of Arts and Social Sciences, KNUST School of Business in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Administration(MBA) in Operations Management), 2008