Abstract

An aim of the study was to develop a standardized questionnaire to measure the quality of medical services based an the patients perception. As a first step, the study attempted to find out the dimensions of inpatients perceptions of medical services and their relationship to consumer behavior. Randomly sampled 600 subjects from 1300 patients, who had been hospitalized in a General Hospital of the Suwon city, were asked to fill out a mailing questionnaire which includes 51 key items regarding to the quality of the radical services. The 269 questionnaires were returned and analyzed. Using the frequency of 'D.K.' responses of each item as a criterion, the 33 items were selected as common and relevant items, With a common factor analysis(principle axis factoring) by Kaiser criterion, 7 factors were revealed which were easy to interpret. The 7 factors included easily identifiable aspects of the in-patients experience: Medical care, Hospital/ward Environment, Nursing, Information, Admissions, Discharge, and Food, Using a multi-trait scaling analysis(correlation matrix of dimension scale and item correlations), the author examined the validity of the items underlying the factors. It was found that most of the items would have acceptably high convergent and discriminant validity and could be used in the future study. To explore the relationships of the dimensions of quality perceptions and other theoretically related variables, the dimension scores were correlated with overall satisfaction score, overall health outcome score, and behavioral intention(to return visit/recommend) score. The present results suggested that Hospital/ward environment, Medical care, Nursing, and Information might be the major factors which could affect post-consumption behaviors of the patients. The factor structure of the present study was discussed and compared with the results of the researches that studied the inpatients perceptions of medical service. The author discussed the relationships between the quality perceptions and the post-consumption behaviors. Also the author suggested some considerations far future study and discussed the limitations of the present study.