Foreign patient customer satisfaction with private hospital service

Abstract

Thailand has faced problems from numerous unfavorable factors from both external and internal fronts which affected overall business. The economic contribution of the hospitalist is determined by the reduction in cost, the impact on hospital reimbursement, and improvements in patient throughput. Therefore, the service arm intends to continue its improvement process of the patient cares and general services throughout organization. This research focuses on the customer satisfaction of foreign patients in regards to Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) at one private hospital to categorize five behaviors of service standards: Hearty, Empathy, Attention, Relationship, Trust and Overall Satisfaction. The data were collected from February to December 2008. The objectives of the research are to study foreign patients customer satisfaction with private hospital services in one private hospital and to identify factor criteria influence customer satisfaction. The result would be used as guidelines to improve the quality of service in behavior of all staff levels in the hospital and to increase customer satisfaction by using five main behaviors of service standards. Calculation determined a sample size of 4704. From the study, the level of customer satisfaction rated high in all categories: Hearty, Empathy, Attention, Relationship, Trust and Overall Satisfaction. The highest rank in overall performance from “Excellent” was in the category, Hearty with a rate of 73.4%. The next highest were Trust (73.2%) and Empathy (69.6%). Low ranks from customer satisfaction were Attention (64.8%) and Relationship (66.3%). Overall satisfaction was at 72.1% in this study. Patients will generally form an impression of the level of competence of the staff as they experience various services during their hospital visit. One way of achieving this is through training programs that must be designed to reinforce the need to incorporate this mode of thinking among all the hospital staff. Moreover, hospital management should reward those units with higher patient satisfaction so that the units with less satisfied patients have some incentives to work better for higher patient satisfaction. The customer satisfaction is upon the background, culture and experience. Further analysis and researches are needed to study the customer satisfaction of each nation to customize the customer expectation to get better analysis of patient satisfaction among different nationality.