Service Quality Improvement of Healthcare Through Complex Systems Perspective: A Case of Yekatit-12 Hospital
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Date
2023-10
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Service quality of healthcare is usually expressed as the extent of service providers’ attempt to meet or even exceed patients’ expectations during the service on the one hand and the level of patients’ satisfaction with their perceived quality of service on the other hand. On top of that, healthcare service sectors are an integral component of all types of communities, regardless of where they are located, since they are geared toward satisfaction for patients while offering the proper services in the proper manners and at the proper times. Nevertheless, it’s an obvious phenomenon that the existing healthcare system has been regarded as a linear hierarchic interaction although recent developments point out healthcare systems as complex entities that exhibit multifaceted patterns of non-linear interactions in their very nature. Thus, this research aims to enhance the quality of current healthcare services through a complex systems perspective. To do so, data was collected from the case hospital (Yekatit-12 Hospital) through direct observation, interview questions, and SERVQUAL dimensions-based questionnaires.
Having corroborated with data interpretations from the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), the level of patient satisfaction was analyzed based on the five-point Likert scale and then complex causality noticed in the system was depicted using the system dynamics (SD) modeling. The result showed the three most problematic SERVQUAL dimensions in the hospital’s healthcare service. i.e., longer waiting time (reliability-related), complaints managing problems (empathy-related), and lack of a trend of intentionally asking about patients’ needs accompanied by swift action (courtesy-related) issues in decreasing order of their severity. Having applied SD modeling, all three problems listed above have been addressed and consequently, healthcare professionals and other academics in similar niches are encouraged for the furtherance of what is done here.