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The purpose of this study is to summarize the available pool of literature on service quality to identify different dimensions of service quality in the healthcare industry and understand how it is measured. The study attempts to explore the research gaps in the literature about different service quality dimensions and patient satisfaction.

A systematic literature review process was followed to achieve the objectives of the study. Various inclusion and exclusion criteria were used to select relevant research articles from 2000–2020 for the study, and a total of 100 research articles were selected.

The study identified 41 different dimensions of healthcare service quality measurement and classified these dimensions into four categories, namely servicescape, personnel, hospital administration and patients. It can be concluded that SERVQUAL is the most widely used service quality measurement tool.

The study identified that a majority of the researchers deduced a positive relationship between SERVQUAL dimensions and the quality of healthcare services. The findings of study will assist hospital executives in formulating effective strategies to ensure that patients receive superior quality healthcare services.

The purpose of this paper is to increase knowledge of the role organizational factors have in how health personnel make efficiency-thoroughness trade-offs, and how these trade-offs potentially affect clinical quality dimensions.

The paper is a thematic synthesis of the literature concerning health personnel working in clinical, somatic healthcare services, organizational factors and clinical quality.

Identified organizational factors imposing trade-offs were high workload, time limits, inappropriate staffing and limited resources. The trade-offs done by health personnel were often trade-offs weighing thoroughness (e.g. providing extra handovers or working additional hours) in an environment weighing efficiency (e.g. ward routines of having one single handover and work-hour regulations limiting physicians' work hours). In this context, the health personnel functioned as regulators, balancing efficiency and thoroughness and ensuring patient safety and patient centeredness. However, sometimes organizational factors limited health personnel's flexibility in weighing these aspects, leading to breached medication rules, skipped opportunities for safety debriefings and patients being excluded from medication reviews.

Balancing resources and healthcare demands while maintaining healthcare quality is a large part of health personnel's daily work, and organizational factors are suspected to affect this balancing act. Yet, there is limited research on this subject. With the expected aging of the population and the subsequent pressure on healthcare services' resources, the balancing between efficiency and thoroughness will become crucial in handling increased healthcare demands, while maintaining high-quality care.

Bureaucracy to a large extent entrenches orderliness and productive means of achieving goals in both public and private organisations across the world. However, bureaucracy is not suitable in the management of hospitals due to its peculiar nature of operations. This study investigates the conundrum of bureaucratic processes and health-care service delivery in government hospitals in Nigeria.

The study surveyed 600 outpatients and attendees visiting tertiary and government hospitals in Nigeria using descriptive design to obtained data from the respondents. A research instrument, questionnaire, was used to gather data. Out of the 600 outpatients visiting the 20 hospitals in government and tertiary hospitals, 494 responses were returned from the attendees. The study employed random sampling strategy to collect the information.

The findings of this study were that service delivery in government hospitals were in adverse position on all the four constructs of bureaucratic dimensions as against quality of service delivery in hospitals in Nigeria. It discovered that bureaucratic impersonality cannot impact on the quality of service delivery in government hospitals in Nigeria. Separation and division of labour among health workers have no significant effect on quality service delivery in government hospitals. Formal rules and regulations (administrative procedure, rules, and policies) prevent quality service delivery in government hospitals in Nigeria. Also, patient’s waiting time was not significant to the quality of service delivery in government hospitals.

The results are constrained with dimensions of bureaucratic processes. Thus, the implication of this study is that bureaucracy in the Nigerian public hospitals is an unnecessary marriage which should be carefully separated and de-emphasised for quality service delivery in the hospitals to thrive.

Largely, this study is practical essential as it unearths the irrelevant operations procedure that hinder progress in Nigerian hospitals.

The study accomplishes recognised importance to survey how bureaucracy impedes quality service delivery in government hospitals. This study has provided a vital clue to elements that will bring rapid attention to patients’outcome in Nigerian hospitals and health-care facilities which hitherto has not been emphasised. The study has contributed to the existing body of knowledge associated to healthcare service quality in developing country.

Teamwork is essential for patient safety as highly functioning teams make fewer errors. In high acuity academic medical centers, care delivery is complex and ever-changing, creating a high-risk environment for safety concerns. These intricate settings demand a collaborative approach to care delivery, where structured methods of teamwork and communication are engrained in day-to-day practice. With teamwork being a critical component of patient safety and communication failures likened to preventable medical errors, hospitals are looking to bolster leadership training and improve team dynamics. TeamSTEPPS is a proven method shown to enhance teamwork, communication, leadership, and patient satisfaction. TeamSTEPPS provides an evidence-based framework to optimize patient outcomes by improving communication and teamwork skills among healthcare professionals. Current literature on teamwork and communication demonstrates that nurse practitioners are uniquely positioned to improve team performance through the use of the TeamSTEPPS framework.

This study investigates the relationships between team dynamics and performance in healthcare operations. Specifically, it explores, through wearable sensors, how team coordination mechanisms can influence the likelihood of surgical glitches during routine surgery.

Breast surgeries of a large Italian university hospital were monitored using Sociometric Badges – wearable sensors developed at MIT Media Lab – for collecting objective and systematic measures of individual and group behaviors in real time. Data retrieved were used to analyze team coordination mechanisms, as it evolved in the real settings, and finally to test the research hypotheses.

Findings highlight that a relevant portion of glitches in routine surgery is caused by improper team coordination practices. In particular, results show that the likelihood of glitches decreases when practitioners adopt implicit coordination mechanisms rather than explicit ones. In addition, team cohesion appears to be positively related with the surgical performance.

For the first time, direct, objective and real time measurements of team behaviors have enabled an in-depth evaluation of the team coordination mechanisms in surgery and the impact on surgical glitches. From a methodological perspective, this research also represents an early attempt to investigate coordination behaviors in dynamic and complex operating environments using wearable sensor tools.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the determinants of health outcomes of dialysis patients, while specifically focusing on the role of dialysis process measures and dialysis practice characteristics. The dialysis industry is facing a major transition from a volume-based health care system to a value-based cost-efficient care model, in the USA. Under the bundled Prospective Payment System, the treatment-based payment model is subject to meeting quality thresholds as defined by clinical process measures including dialysis adequacy and anemia management. Few studies have focused on studying these two processes and their association with the quality of patient health outcomes.

In this study, the authors focus on identifying the determinants of patient health outcomes among freestanding dialysis clinics, using a large cross-sectional data set of 4,571 dialysis clinics in the USA. The authors use econometric analyses to estimate the association between dialysis facility characteristics and practice patterns and their association with dialysis process measures and hospitalization risk.

The authors find that reusing dialyzers and increasing the number of dialysis stations is associated with higher levels of clinical quality. This research indicates that deploying more nurses on-site allows patients to avail adequate dialysis, while increasing the supply of physicians can hurt anemia control process. In addition, the authors report that offering peritoneal dialysis and late night shifts are not beneficial practices in terms of their impact on the hospitalization risk.

While early studies of dialysis care mainly focused on the associations between practice patterns and patient outcomes, this research reveals the underlying mechanisms of these relationships by exploring the mediation effects of clinical dialysis processes on patient outcomes. The results indicate that dialysis process measures mediate the impact of the operational characteristics of dialysis centers on patient hospitalization rates.

This study offers several managerial insights for owners and operators of dialysis clinics with respect to the association between managerial and clinical practices that they deploy within dialysis clinics and their impact on clinical quality measures as well as hospitalization risk of patients. Managers can draw on this study to optimize staffing levels in their dialysis clinics, and implement innovative clinical practices.

Considering the growth in healthcare expenditures in developing and developed countries, and specifically for costly diagnoses such as dialyses, this study offers several insights related to the inter-relationships between dialysis practice patterns and their clinical quality measures.

This study makes several major contributions. First, the authors address the extant gap in the literature on the relationships between dialysis facility and practice characteristics and clinical outcomes, while specifically highlighting the role of clinical process measures as antecedents of patient hospitalization ratio, a key metric used to measure performance of dialysis clinics. Second, this study sheds light on the underlying mechanisms that serve as enablers of the dialysis adequacy and anemia management. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore these relationships in the dialysis industry. The authors’ approach provides a new direction for future studies to explore the pathways that may impact clinical quality measures in the delivery of dialysis services.

In Thailand, most patients with cancer primarily receive in-home care from their family members. However, information regarding the quality of life (QoL) of the primary family-member caregivers is scarce. The purpose of this paper is to assess primary family-member caregivers’ QoL and its association with self-efficacy and social support using a Thai version of the Caregiver Quality of Life Index-Cancer (CQOLC).

This hospital-based cross-sectional study was performed at a teaching hospital in Bangkok. Questionnaires were administered to 178 primary family-member caregivers of patients with cancer between June 2015 and July 2016, and their QoL was measured using a Thai translation of the CQOLC made by the research team. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were performed using SPSS software (version 18).

Approximately 79.8 percent of primary family-member caregivers were female, 86.0 percent were 18-51 years old. In total, 52.8 percent reported having a good QoL, 60.1 percent reported a moderate level of perceived self-efficacy, and 56.7 percent reported a high level of perceived social support for providing care. Primary family-member caregivers, who provided care for male cancer patients and were co-responsible for covering the patient’s cost of care, had a lower level of perceived self-efficacy and perceived social support. They also reported having poorer QoL. The patients’ characteristics were more strongly associated with the family-member caregivers’ QoL, than the family-member caregivers’ characteristics, perceived self-efficacy, and perceived social support.

Approximately 50 percent of primary family-member caregivers reported having a good QoL. Healthcare providers should incorporate the self-efficacy concept to help improve primary family caregiver’s self-efficacy to provide care to patients with cancer, especially for individuals who are caring for male patients, and provide counseling for primary family-member caregivers regarding ways to obtain the necessary social and financial support to improve their QoL.