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Service quality (SQ) has become an essential and indispensable component in healthcare and many other industries. SQ can deliver guaranteed stakeholder value and consequent consumer delight in the healthcare sector. The purpose of this study is to identify the relationships of various SERVQUAL elements with respect to the SQ of surgical instrument suppliers among surgeons.

Data were collected from a sample of 112 surgeons working in the USA using the “snowball sampling” technique. A few standardised questionnaires, including SERQUAL, were used to collect the data. R-programming was used to perform structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis on the collected data.

The research study identified that service delivery factors and the SQ of surgical instruments contribute significantly towards medical practitioner sensitivity in the US healthcare industry. Word of mouth (WOM) did not have any significant impact on the medical practitioners' sensitivity.

A review of related literature revealed that studies that examine the surgeon's perspectives of SQ are scarce. Thus, the present study is directed towards this gap in literature. The findings of the study are significant in nature and have made a substantial contribution to management literature.

Meeting the patients' requirements as customers of the health care sector is crucially important as a social responsibility. According to the resource constraints, only an efficient utilisation of health services can provide that purpose. This study aims to develop a quantitative assessment framework for radiology centres as a vital section in healthcare to translate the patients' requirements into service quality specifications. This would help to achieve quality improvement by emphasising the voice of customers.

A literature review is conducted to specify the service quality criteria and the patients' requirements related to healthcare and hospitals. Based on the experts' opinions, these criteria and requirements are later customised for the radiology centres. Moreover, the requirements are categorised into five dimensions of SERVQUAL. The interrelations between service elements are also determined through expert group consensus using Pearson correlation. Afterwards, by applying the QFD method, the relations between the requirements and criteria are explored. Additionally, a customer satisfaction survey is executed in Tehran public hospitals to prioritise these requirements and provide an importance-satisfaction analysis.

Based on the result of the case study, service elements are prioritised for improvement, and practical suggestions are provided using the Delphi technique for quality improvement. In addition, a cause-and-effect diagram is presented to highlight the improvement area and provide enhancement suggestions.

This study is the first empirical attempt to benefit from the VOC in evaluating and enhancing the quality of service delivered to radiology patients. In doing so, the study applies a hybrid approach of QFD and SERVQUAL as well as other tools to highlight the improvement area and provide enhancement suggestions. The findings can be readily used by the practitioners.

The present research aims to evaluate the quality of services provided by the Basic Health Units (UBS) of the Unified Health System (SUS) located in the city of Recife, in the state of Pernambuco, Brazil, using the Kano model integrated with the dimensions of quality proposed by the service quality (SERVQUAL) model.

The research was classified as bibliographic, descriptive, quantitative and surveyable. A structured questionnaire based on the Kano Model integrated with the dimensions of quality proposed by the SERVQUAL model, applied online through Google Forms. The questionnaires were distributed on social networks, obtaining a non-probabilistic sample of 120 individuals, collected for convenience.

Through the analysis of the Kano Model, it was possible to observe that all the investigated attributes are classified as one-dimensional. Among the attributes that deserve to be highlighted are attributes “Clean and pleasant environment”, “Reliability and security of information”, “Knowledge of employees to perform services”, “Service performed in the promised time”, “Polite and kind staff in dealing with users” and “Effectiveness of the service provided” due to having the longest intervals when considering the satisfaction and dissatisfaction coefficients, above 1.575. These attributes must be considered as critical priorities when implementing improvements, since their presence considerably increases users' satisfaction, as well as their absence generates great dissatisfaction.

The research is original and justified by the potential use of a quality assessment tool in the public health service, especially primary care. It is noteworthy that there are few works that integrate the Kano and SERVQUAL models applied in the public health service and that this integration can contribute to the national and international literature, mainly in the identification and prioritization of areas for improvement.

There is an increasing interest in using information and communication technologies to support health services. But the adoption and development of even basic ICT communications services in many health services is limited, leaving enormous gaps in the broad understanding of its role in health care delivery. The purpose of this paper is to address a specific (intercultural) area of healthcare communications consumer disadvantage; and it examines the potential for ICT exploitation through the lens of a conceptual framework. The opportunity to pursue a new solutions pathway has been amplified in recent times through the development of computer-based ontologies and the resultant knowledge from ontologist activity and consequential research publishing.

A specific intercultural area of patient disadvantage arises from variations in meaning and understanding of patient and clinician words, phrases and non-verbal expression. Collection and localization of data concepts, their attributes and individual instances were gathered from an Aboriginal trainee nurse focus group and from a qualitative gap analysis (QGA) of 130 criteria-selected sources of literature. These concepts, their relationships and semantic interpretations populate the computer ontology. The ontology mapping involves two domains, namely, Aboriginal English (AE) and Type II diabetes care guidelines. This is preparatory to development of the Patient Practitioner Assistive Communications (PPAC) system for Aboriginal rural and remote patient primary care.

The combined QGA and focus group output reported has served to illustrate the call for three important drivers of change. First, there is no evidence to contradict the hypothesis that patient-practitioner interview encounters for many Australian Aboriginal patients and wellbeing outcomes are unsatisfactory at best. Second, there is a potent need for cultural competence knowledge and practice uptake on the part of health care providers; and third, the key contributory component to determine success or failures within healthcare for ethnic minorities is communication. Communication, however, can only be of value in health care if in practice it supports shared cognition; and mutual cognition is rarely achievable when biopsychosocial and other cultural worldview differences go unchallenged.

There has been no direct engagement with remote Aboriginal communities in this work to date. The authors have initially been able to rely upon a cohort of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people with relevant cultural expertise and extended family relationships. Among these advisers are health care practitioners, academics, trainers, Aboriginal education researchers and workshop attendees. It must therefore be acknowledged that as is the case with the QGA, the majority of the concept data is from third parties. The authors have also discovered that urban influences and cultural sensitivities tend to reduce the extent of, and opportunity to, witness AE usage, thereby limiting the ability to capture more examples of code-switching. Although the PPAC system concept is qualitatively well developed, pending future work planned for rural and remote community engagement the authors presently regard the work as mostly allied to a hypothesis on ontology-driven communications. The concept data population of the AE home talk/health talk ontology has not yet reached a quantitative critical mass to justify application design model engineering and real-world testing.

Computer ontologies avail us of the opportunity to use assistive communications technology applications as a dynamic support system to elevate the pragmatic experience of health care consultations for both patients and practitioners. The human-machine interactive development and use of such applications is required just to keep pace with increasing demand for healthcare and the growing health knowledge transfer environment. In an age when the worldwide web, communications devices and social media avail us of opportunities to confront the barriers described the authors have begun the first construction of a merged schema for two domains that already have a seemingly intractable negative connection. Through the ontology discipline of building syntactically and semantically robust and accessible concepts; explicit conceptual relationships; and annotative context-oriented guidance; the authors are working towards addressing health literacy and wellbeing outcome deficiencies of benefit to the broader communities of disadvantage patients.

This study aims to address the question of how the unified theory of acceptance and utilization of technology (UTAUT) model explains the use of ICT by medical practitioners in private hospitals in Osun State, Nigeria.

Data were collected from a systematic random sample of 211 medical practitioners in 135 hospitals using a questionnaire.

The respondents were more comfortable with mobile phones than they were with any other technologies. The significance of the relationship between age of respondents and use of ICT reduced with increasing age of respondents higher than 39. Availability of ICTs and the social worlds of the medical practitioners, together with ICT implementation contexts, positively and significantly explained the use of ICT in the hospitals.

An expanded study focusing specifically on how social influence promotes ICT use by medical practitioners in private hospitals in the state will be a necessity.

The medical practitioners seemed to have overcome the challenges of individual and technological factors in using ICT in the hospitals, but not so for implementation context, which explained ICT use, supporting the need for improved community‐hospital relationship.

Information technology use models have been used extensively in various studies in Nigeria, but none have deployed the recent version of the technology acceptance model in the hospital sector.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate whether health maintenance organizations (HMO) physicians are more price sensitive than non‐HMO physicians in their prescribing behavior of brand‐name substitutes.

The study uses physician level data and a set of 13 drugs for the years 1997‐2000 to estimate the price sensitivity of HMO and non‐HMO physicians. A two‐part model is used to measure the price elasticity of brand‐name prescribing for HMO physicians. The first part uses a logit model to examine the physician's choice to prescribe the same drug to all patients with the same medical condition, or whether physicians alternate prescriptions among brand‐name substitutes. The second part employs OLS to estimate the influence of managed care, i.e. HMOs, on physician price sensitivity.

The results suggest that HMO physicians are less likely than non‐HMO physicians to prescribe a common drug to all patients with a specific medical condition, but rather HMO physicians exhibit more diversified prescribing behavior. Correspondingly, HMO physicians are more price sensitive in prescribing brand‐name substitutes, than non‐HMO physicians, exhibiting price elasticities of prescribing ranging from −1.707 to −1.823. The analysis suggests that HMOs have a modest influence on encouraging physicians to be more price sensitive in their prescribing of brand‐name substitutes. HMO physicians are more price sensitive in their prescribing behavior than non‐HMO physicians.

This paper provides insight into the effectiveness of HMOs in altering physician prescribing behavior and price sensitivity of pharmaceutical prices. The results provide suggestions on how HMOs can improve the cost‐effectiveness of physician prescribing behavior.

This paper aims to introduce an under-researched concept, travel medicine, to the hospitality field and proposes future research directions. This paper also highlights the need to acknowledge the missing link between hospitality and medical science and encourages research on the health of hotel guests, especially those with mental disorders.

By synthesizing relevant literature, this study proposes a conceptual framework focused on identifying and filling knowledge gaps between hospitality and medical science. Pathways for empirical research on hotel guests’ travel health are suggested accordingly.

This paper reveals that the topic of travel medicine has been neglected in hospitality, especially in relation to vulnerable hotel guests. Additionally, this study suggests that researchers should move beyond the confines of social science and conduct interdisciplinary hospitality studies. In-depth analyses of hotel guests’ health and safety are also recommended.

This conceptual piece serves as a “provocation” that is exploratory, thus laying a foundation for future interdisciplinary studies bridging hospitality and medical science. This paper offers practical significance for hospitality stakeholders (i.e. academics, practitioners, hotel guests and society) and also provides guidelines on how to create vulnerability-friendly hospitality environments.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study takes an important step toward interdisciplinary research between hospitality and medical science through the lens of travel medicine. This paper offers insight to bridge these disciplines and extend hospitality research into medical science. This paper further identifies an under-investigated topic and feasible research avenues that can offer timely solutions for hospitality academics and practitioners.

This study aims to test a conceptual model using public attitudes toward biomedicine and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) to predict respondents’ medical treatment choice.

A quantitative online survey was conducted using quota sampling. Altogether 1,321 questionnaires from Hong Kong residents of age 15 years or above were collected.

Attitudes toward biomedicine in relation to TCM and perceived cost of TCM consultation were found to be significant variables in predicting respondents’ medical treatment choice of treatment. Perceived efficacy of TCM, however, was not a significant predictor. Older respondents, as well as respondents with higher education, were less likely to consult biomedicine first when ill. They were also less likely to consult biomedicine exclusively.

This study uses a convenience sample recruited through personal networks. The findings cannot be generalized to the rest of the population.

Respondents in the study generally perceived TCM’s efficacy to be high, but not high enough to make it the medical treatment of choice. To promote TCM in Hong Kong, there is a need to enhance trust in it. This can be achieved through strengthening scientific research and development of TCM, enhancing professional standards of TCM practitioners and educating the public about the qualifications of TCM practitioners. Strategic channel planning to reach potential target and reducing the time cost of TCM medication should be examined.

The study is the first to relate attitudes to and perceptions of TCM with medical treatment choices in Hong Kong.

This study examined 46 articles in total, which yielded 5 recurring themes: perceived discrimination, language barriers, socioeconomic barriers, cultural barriers and educational/knowledge barriers. The two most dominant themes found were the inability to speak the country's primary language and belonging to a culture with different practices and values from the host country. The review provides vital insights into the numerous challenges that immigrants and refugees encounter as they navigate through the primary care systems of English-speaking (E-S) countries and potential solutions to overcome these barriers.

Access to adequate healthcare plays a central part in ensuring the physical and mental wellbeing of society. However, vulnerable groups such as immigrants and refugees, face numerous challenges when utilizing these healthcare services. To shed further light on the barriers impacting healthcare quality, the authors’ team performed a scoping thematic review of the available literature on immigrant and refugees' experiences in primary healthcare systems across E-S countries. Articles were systematically reviewed while focusing on healthcare perceptions by immigrants, potential barriers and suggestions to improve the quality of primary care.

This work looked at qualitative and quantitative information, attempting to combine both paradigms to give a rich and robust platform with which to devise a further study through focus groups. Qualitative inquiry accounted for 28/46, or 61%, of studies, and quantitative inquiry made up 9/46, or 20%, while 9/46 or 20% combined both qualitative and qualitative. Emerging themes are -perceived ethnic discrimination faced by immigrants accessing primary care, language barriers, socioeconomic barriers, cultural barriers and educational barriers.

Most medical journals rely on quantitative data to relate “results” and cases. The authors set out to change ways in which medical reports can be done. Most of the authors were solely trained in quantitative research; consequently, they had to learn to isolate themes and to use a narrative approach in the article.

Research implications clearly indicated that using a qualitative (phenomenological) approach with quantitative data created a human and reachable discourse around patient comfort and the realities of immigrants and refugees to E-S countries. The use of this research opens medical practitioners (and patients) to a richer understanding within a usually difficult arena.

By understanding the qualitative nature of medical research, practitioners, students and mentors are able to bridge medical quantitivity to the human, widening doors to social science and medical collaboratory research.

As stated above, this work is important as it understands the human/patient element and de-emphasizes the medical obsession with quantifying the lives of patients through hard data. This is a unique collaboration that relies on the qualitative to pinpoint and define the difficulties of newcomers to E-S countries.

The purpose of this study is to determine the extent to which total quality management (TQM) initiatives can improve the quality of services delivery at the medical records unit of the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital (KBTH) to help meet the expectations and aspirations of patients and customers of the hospital.

This research adopted the survey strategy as its research design. The total study population consisted of 114 medical records staff of the KBTH. Questionnaires and personal observations were employed as the data collection instruments. The study recorded a response rate of 98 per cent. Data gathered from respondents were analysed in qualitative terms.

The overall finding of this study was that, although the medical records department of the KBTH had a fair degree of understanding on the benefits of TQM to records management service delivery, the exiting values for TQM did not meet the framework of good TQM practice, principles and standards.

Even though the subjects for the study were from the biggest hospital in Ghana, the findings of this study may not be generalised to the whole country.

The study has demonstrated the need for the medical records department of the KBTH to have and develop good TQM standards to improve the quality of services to patients and varied customers of the hospital.

The literature reviewed indicated that this study is a maiden attempt to examine how TQM initiatives including sensitivity, customer satisfaction, commitment of top management, team work, effective leadership and participatory management, people development and effective and open communication can improve the quality of medical records service delivery at the KBTH in Ghana.