Effect Of Healthcare Quality On Patients’ Satisfaction In Public Hospitals In Tanzania

Providing health care is very crucial and therefore care must be taken to ensure that service providers provide adequate services to patients which would lead to quick recovery and patients’ satisfaction.Patient’s satisfaction is sometimes thought of as an outcome evaluation of a healthcare provider’s handling of patient when they visit for service.Patient who perceive a satisfactory healthcare service are more willing to recommend families and others to the same facility due to the outcome of their encounter.Patient satisfaction is a measurement tool for healthcare quality as it gives feedback on the provider’s success at meeting patient’s expectations.There is an increasing pressure on health care facilities to improve the quality of their services by ensuring that patients receive the best of care that meet their needs.Medical care facilities must therefore invest resources in discovering new methods of dispensing their services to meet the changing needs of their clients.One way of doing this is by undertaking surveys to unearth the changing needs of clients and to improve on their processes.The focus of this research is to explore the effect Healthcare quality on patients’ satisfaction in public hospitals in Tanzania.A convenient sample of 865 respondents was obtained from patients at Tabora regional hospital and health centre in Tabora Municipal.The data analysis was done using the Structural Equation Modeling technique.Findings from this study revealed a negative gap score for patients’ satisfaction which indicates an overall dissatisfaction in the quality of health care service.The result of the gap model shows that the expectations of patients with regards to service quality is not met.The findings showed that aside the assurance dimension,all the other four SERVQUAL dimensions had negative score on the Perception-Expectation score.This could be as a result of the hospital promising too much or the patients expecting too much from the hospitals.Additionally,the results show of the five dimensions used to measure patients’ level of satisfaction,respondents were least satisfied with the responsiveness dimension,followed by empathy,tangibles,reliability and assurance.This finding suggests that assurance and reliability are more likely to influence patient’s satisfaction more than the other four variables on the same dimension.This finding means that,patients attending public hospitals in Tanzania have high expectations on the assurance and reliability of services offered by the public hospitals.With regards to the hypothesis stated in this study,findings from hypothesis tested revealed that health service quality had a positive and significant relationship with Patient’s satisfaction and service experience.Health service quality was found to have a positive and significant effect on service expectation.This means that,patient expectations would have an effect or influence the level of quality they expect to receive from the service provider.A patient with high expectation during service encounter would not settle or accept anything short of their level of service they wish to receive.Additionally,the study found a positive and significant relationship between service experience and health service quality.This finding seems to suggest that patients’ prior experience would influence their perception of quality of service during service encounter.Service providers therefore must understand that patients past experience with a particular service or service provider would influence the next level of service encounter.Furthermore,this study found a positive and significant relationship between service experience and patient’s satisfaction.Patient’s prior service experience would have an influence on their satisfaction level during service encounters.A patient’s prior experience during a service encounter with the same service provider or different service would leave a lasting impression on him or her about that particular service or related services he or she wishes to receive.If the previous service encounter was positive,there would be a positive reinforcement;however,where the previous encounter was negative,the patients would also not want to remember that negative encounter which would affect his or her satisfaction with the service delivery.Again,this study found a positive but insignificant relationship between Service expectation and Patient’s satisfaction.This finding seems to also suggest that service expectations of patients do not influence their satisfaction.That is,the level of service a patient wishes to receive would not affect his or her satisfaction.However,prior literature suggests that expectations are used to measure standard of service upon which judgment of satisfaction are made.Finally,this study revealed a positive relationship between service experience and service expectation.This means that,a patient’s expectation of a service is likely to be influenced by his/her past experience.If the patient has a positive experience in the past,it is likely that the patient would be expecting to receive similar service and vice versa.