Research On The Service Quality Of Elderly Home Care In Urban Community

Elderly home care indicates a pattern that senior citizens living in their homes meanwhile they are offered old-age support from the society. While elderly home care services in communities indicates a pattern in which a family is the nuclear, a community is the support and a professional organization is the service deliver.Elderly home care in the community has become most Chinese older people’s choice to live their late life in the background of fast population aging, which brings growing service demands and enables developing the service to be a pressing task in the process of tackling problems led by population aging. As a public service, elderly home care featured common characteristics like equality and welfare-related, as well as demands individuality, plurality and uncertainty. And its quality is directly related to the standard of older people’s late life. Therefore, researching on the service quality of elderly home care in urban communities is beneficial to promote the scientificility of its management thus enhancing its quality and is beneficial to increase the efficiency of public inputs and facilitate social services to grow in an equal and efficient mode, as well as is of critical practical significance to secure and enhance older people’s life standard. Meanwhile, it will make new explorations to public management theory and research methods and be of some theoretical values to construct a theoretical framework of quality assessment of elderly home care in community, establish a quality assessment model based on PZB (A·Parasuraman, Valarie A·Zeithaml&Leonard L·Berry) Model and apply theories and research methods of management science to public service studies.This dissertation firstly defines the basic concept of service quality of elderly home care in community and analytically states that this service embodies the common characteristics of service products, namely intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability and perishability as well as its own special characteristics such as various service items, plural service suppliers, uncertain service environments, etc. The dissertation starts from the analysis of characteristics and attributes of elderly home care in community and divides this service into three categories, namely life assistance service, medical care service and spiritual comfort in accordance with older people’s basic needs. Furthermore, quality assessment of elderly home care is divided into four core components, namely meals assistance service, cleanliness assistance service, medical care assistance service and recreation and rehabilitation assistance service. In the meantime, SERVQUAL (Service Quality) method is introduced into the quality assessment of this service and the former dimension of tangibles is replaced by sensibility. After this adjustment, five assessment dimensions of elderly home care in community’s quality are formed based on SERVQUAL, namely sensibility, reliability, assurance, responsiveness, and empathy. And a theoretical framework of quality assessment of elderly home care in community is established.The questionnaire and assessment scales in this research are based on the theoretical framework. Through a door-to-door questionnaire survey with the samples in Shanghai and a constitutive equation of quality assessment of elderly home care in community established by SERVQUAL model, this research constructs an empirical model of quality assessment of elderly home care in urban community with statistics software SPSS and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and in the methods of principal component analysis of exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, multivariate analysis of variance and so on. SEM is applied to test the structure of the empirical research, and the quality of elderly home care in community is defined as the higher-order model of quality of meal assistance service, cleanliness assistance service, medical care assistance service and recreation and rehabilitation assistance service. Through constructing a measurement model to assess the quality of elderly home care in community from five dimensions, a conclusion can be drawn that the quality of this service has positive correlation with its sub-services, namely meal assistance, cleanliness assistance, medical care assistance and recreation and rehabilitation assistance. And it is found that the model has high reliability and stability after validity, reliability and goodness of fit test.According to comparative research of the different services and different dimensions, we can find that phenomenal difference exists among the quality of four assistance services, i.e. cleanliness assistance service has the highest quality, meals assistance service has the second highest quality, and the quality of medical care assistance service is phenomenal lower than the first two while that of recreation and rehabilitation assistance service is phenomenal lower than other three. And through comparing different dimensions of measuring this service’s quality, we can find that the results of assurance, sensibility and responsiveness are similar and high, while empathy is much lower and assurance is the lowest.With the multivariate analysis of variance of elderly home care in community, it’s found there are differences of service clients like age, gender and self-care ability will impose influences to the assessment results to various extents and older people’s livelihood like living conditions, income, welfare benefits and residence locations will also influence their expectancy of the service, thus influencing their assessments of service quality.The last part of the dissertation puts forward following suggestions of enhancing the service quality of elderly home care in community:enhancing the standard of the service through improving service system, providing personalized service to enhance the community home care services targeted, strengthening human resources to ensure the professional community home care services, and enlarging governmental inputs to increase service satisfaction;...