Determinants of service orientation among medical students

Abstract

In the near future, today's medical students will be working increasingly in a variety of settings and directly interacting with the public. Although a patient's interaction with a physician ordinarily represents only one aspect of a specific health experience, one could argue that the quality of this particular interaction is of considerable importance to patients. Central to this interaction is the notion of service orientation, which has been defined as those attitudes and behaviors that influence the quality of the interaction between service providers and consumers. This chapter presents a description of research on the concept of service orientation among a sample of medical students. The results indicate that medical students exhibiting greater levels of service orientation are those who are older, female, married, and who place greater emphasis on their future incomes and perceptions of patient expectations for the service quality dimensions of responsiveness and tangibles.

Citation

O'Connor, S.J., Trinh, H.Q. and Shewchuk, R.M. (2000), "Determinants of service orientation among medical students", Advances in Health Care Management (Advances in Health Care Management, Vol. 1), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 217-249. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1474-8231(00)01010-7