ABSTRACT:
Introduction: In the recent years, building and maintaining the sustainable competitive advantage across various sectors has become important for businesses. In the case of Hospitals, quality has been proven as one of the important parameters for differentiating and thereby developing a competitive advantage over others. With the advent of more numbers of private players in the industry along with the wholehearted support by the Government through initiatives like Make in India campaigns, the demand has begun for transformation from the basic healthcare provider to wellness provider. In this time, we can take lessons from the hotel industry, which shares many characteristics with the hospital sector. In the hotel industry, after years of research and implications of quality standards widespread innovations and improvements for customer service has derived. Now it is the time to transform the hospital industry on the same line with the hotel sector. With this in the background, our study is an effort for measuring the level of satisfaction and getting feedbacks from the patients for improving the quality standards in hospitals. Our article has tried to reduce the gap between both the sectors so that the hospital can leverage from the successful advancements made in the hotel industry. Materials and Methods: A questionnaire was developed after a thorough review of the literature and using the 22 set questions of SERVQUAL model. The 22 items representing five services quality dimensions empathy, assurance, tangible, timeliness and responsiveness. The perception and expectation of patients were recorded on a seven-point scale. The total sample size of 120 was taken for the study. Results and Discussion: Decoding the table, it is found that there exist a comparatively high gap when it comes to obtaining feedbacks, employees neat appearance, communication regarding services, problem in doing the right things for the first time, poor knowledge of the employees to answer the patients questions and problems in personal attention and offering a clean and comfortable environment. Conclusion:From the above study, we got more of positive responses about the hospital and its services but there exist various areas where we can improvise.In our country hospitals are often considered as intimidating and uncomfortable. So, we need to change the perception of people shifting the attention from the uncomfortable environment to a pleasant place to get well.