Patients' Perception on Service Quality of Government Hospitals

Hospitals play an important role in giving health care facility to customers. This paper examines and measures the quality of services provided by Government hospitals in Thoothukudi district. The objective of this research is to examine the patient perception of hospital services in Government hospitals of Thoothukudi district. For this purpose „SERVQUAL" instrument is used to measure the patient"s expectations and perceptions about service quality delivered by Government hospitals. In this study, five dimensions namely tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy were considered. The research is purely based on primary data. The data has been collected from 772 respondents by using structured questionnaire. Results based on testing the mean differences between expectations and perception indicate that patients" perceived value of the services exceed expectations for all the variables measured. The findings help the Government hospitals to improve in the five dimensions tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy