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From December 2005, patients in the UK needing an operation will be offered a choice of four or five. These could be NHS trusts, foundation trusts, treatment centres, private hospitals or practitioners with a special interest operating within primary care. This is called “Choose and Book”. The purpose of this research is to discover how critical facilities management service factors are in influencing a choice of hospital. The aim is to find out what the most important influencing factors are to people when making a choice of which hospital to have their operation. If facilities services and the patient environment are influencing factors in the patient experience, which are considered critical.

Focus groups were used as the primary method of data collection.

The study finds that all three focus groups placed more importance on clinical factors than facilities factors. High standards of cleanliness and good hospital food were the two facilities factors that participants in all groups placed most importance on. Cleanliness was highlighted by all three groups as a top facilities priority for the NHS at the moment and there was a general perception that private hospitals have better standards of cleanliness.

By understanding how important facilities factors are in influencing patient choice and which ones have a critical impact, it will help NHS trusts focus on where they channel their resources.

This paper is of value to NHS trusts who want to make effective use of facilities services in order to be competitive in attracting patients through the new patient choice framework.

The study aims to examine the factors influencing the choice of private and public hospitals in Ghana.

Purposive and convenient sampling techniques were used in selection of 225 respondents for the study. An independent samples t-test was used in ascertaining the significant difference in the opinions of both groups. Finally, binary logistics regression was used in ascertaining the factors that significantly influenced the choice of hospitals in Ghana.

In Ghana, patients’ choice of private or public hospital was significantly influenced by service quality, word-of-mouth, type of ailment and National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). Patients who made choice decision based on service quality were more likely to attend a private hospital. Word-of-mouth influenced the choice of public hospitals more than private hospitals. Patients preferred visiting public hospitals for more complicated ailments such as spinal defects, HIV/AIDS, heart-related problems, etc. Patients registered under the NHIS also preferred visiting public hospital to private hospital. Although services from private hospitals were more expensive, patients were more satisfied with services provided, as compared to patients from the public hospital. Cost of service and patient satisfaction, however, did not have a statistically significant effect on the choice of hospital.

Most comparative studies done on private and public hospitals studied in isolation focused on service quality, customer satisfaction, national health insurance and cost of health care or a combination of them. This study, however, considered all these selection criteria and extended it by adding word-of-mouth and the type of ailments suffered. The study, thus, provided a more comprehensive hospital selection criteria. The use of logistics regression in this particular area of study was also quite unique.

The purpose of this study was to identify the most important influencing factors in choosing a hospital by a patient.

This study involved a mixed research design. Focus groups and in-depth individual interviews were conducted with patients to explore reasons for choosing a hospital. In addition, this study involved survey-based research on the patient choice.

Type of the hospital, type of the service, word of mouth, cost of services, the health insurance programme, location, physical environment, facilities, providers' expertise and interpersonal behaviour, and reputation of the hospital influenced patients' choice of a hospital. Doctor recommendations and health insurance programme were the main reasons for choosing a hospital for inpatients and outpatients respectively.

Identifying and understanding key factors that influence a patient choice of a healthcare setting helps managers and policy makers invest their resources in those critical areas and improve those aspects of their services to attract more patients.

This article contributes to healthcare theory and practice by developing a conceptual framework for understanding the factors that influence a patient choice of a healthcare setting.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify and explain patient-centered health choices, facilitating health-care providers’ service orientation.

Extensive literature review has been done to extract seven constructs (five dimensions of SERVQUAL, perceived service cost (PSC), and reference) and their underlying 28 items to be quantified. A survey of 201 health consumers was conducted to rate those variables and their constructs. Descriptive statistics and structural equation modeling are utilized to delineate and explicate factors.

The confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that responsiveness has the highest predictive power in explaining hospital choice intention. However, PSC, the only construct, is not statistically significant. The models are considered to have satisfactory reliability, validity, and acceptable fit.

Since the study was administered in Comilla city, the generalizations should be exploited carefully. Future studies can be carried out on the behavioral patterns of patients and attitudes of health-care providers with respect to the discussed factors and variables.

The result highlights patients’ service expectations that can be carefully and creatively applied in the service marketing program, improving doctors’ and nurses’ service orientation, developing physical evidence, and managing references to communicate service value to patients.

What health consumers emphasize and how they incorporate service quality dimensions into hospital choice intention has stayed almost unexplored in the existing literature in Bangladesh. This study provides valuable insights into the meaning of patients’ choices, which will help practitioners and researchers to formulate marketing strategies that improve health-care outcomes and are acceptable to patients.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the different factors patients consider in choosing a hospital in a major city in India, prior to admission.

A 20-item scale to identify various factors a patient considers in choosing a hospital was developed. A field survey was conducted on patients who were discharged in the recent past from a public or a private hospital. The data collected were analysed using multivariate techniques.

The data analysis highlighted several factors in the hospital choice selection process, namely quality of treatment, referral, transport convenience, cost, and safety and services.

This research study was carried out in one of the four major metropolitan cities of India. Nonetheless, the study provides valuable insights into the hospital selection process in a developing country like India.

Hospital managers, in general, can use the study findings to improve the operating performance of their hospitals so that they are able to attract more patients in the future. Additionally, the information can be useful to the marketing managers for developing appropriate marketing strategies for their hospitals.

Majority of the empirical research on hospital choice process has been conducted in Europe and North America. Limited knowledge exists on the same in a developing nation like India. This research illustrates a comprehensive study to address that concern.

This paper develops and tests a descriptive model of management accounting system choice through an empirical analysis of the adoption of innovative cost accounting systems in not-for-profit hospitals. The logistic regression analysis indicates that management accounting system design is impacted by organi zational objectives, technological complexity, and other features of the organizational control system. Descriptive statistics indicate limited use of management accounting techniques common in manufacturing firms, such as standard costing and variance analysis. A cross-lagged model suggests that implementation of an innovative management accounting system may be causally linked to decreasing operating costs.

The volume of international patients has been growing in the past 15 years, with developing countries gaining a larger market share. The international patients market is lucrative, given that hospitals may be able to attract an affluent clientele, and many patients from foreign countries who seek care require complicated procedures and treatments. The purpose of this paper is to build on previous work in the international business and health services fields, to develop a model that predicts a hospital's ability to attract international patients.

The paper is a synthesis of the literature on export ventures and patient choice to predict a hospital's “export” performance.

It is estimated that around 70,000 foreign patients travel each year to the USA to receive inpatient medical care. These patients not only benefit hospitals and medical professionals but also benefit the local community through money spent in hotels, restaurants, shopping, etc. Strategic management, international business, and health services research fields can help us understand how hospitals can be more competitive in attracting international patients. The authors propose that the following dimensions affect a hospital's export performance: hospital resources (hospital attributes, international competence, management commitment, and strategy); institutional environment; and domestic hospital industry factors.

More empirical work is required to test the authors' model.

Most of the studies done on international patients were descriptive in nature. This is the first paper that builds a conceptual model to help us understand what determines a hospital's performance in the international patients market.

The purpose of this paper is to examine multivariate analysis of challenges faced by patrons of medical tourism in Lagos metropolis, Nigeria.

Systematic sampling technique was employed to select 15 specialized private hospitals and 14 Public hospitals in the study area, resulting to a sample size of 29 hospitals. Ten patrons were contacted in each of the selected hospitals; consequently, 290 patrons were sampled.

The major challenges faced across the selected hospitals in the study area as revealed by this study included time spent in transit to hospital (PKI=3.96 and Mean Dev.=0.77), payment procedure is quick and simple (PKI=3.86 and Mean Dev.=0.67), package pricing is not transparent (PKI=3.76 and Mean Dev. =0.57), hospital facilities and equipment are not easily accessible (PKI=3.63 and Mean Dev.=0.44), Doctors do not pay enough attention to patrons (PKI=3.61 and Mean Dev.=0.42), Doctors do not give adequate explanation of patrons condition (PKI=3.49 and Mean Dev.=0.30), High cost of treatments (PKI=3.32 and Mean Dev.=0.13). The result of multiple regression analysis that produced (R²=0.933, F=296.080, p=0.000) meaning that challenges faced by patrons explain 99.3 percent variation of their destination choice.

The study revealed that challenges face by patrons determine their destination choice.

Organizational scholars and practitioners alike have long recognized the role of corporate culture in shaping the strategic and operational choices that organizations pursue. It is the responsibility of those who plan for change to select approaches that are compatible with the enduring elements of the organization’s dominant culture. A large sample of Canadian hospitals were surveyed to assess how organizational culture impacts the choices that organizations make in managing fiscal cutbacks. Results suggest that approaches and strategies used by Canadian hospitals in managing the change are variably influenced by CEO perceptions of the prevailing corporate culture.

Hospitals are complex organisations accounting for most of total health expenditure. They play a critical role in providing care to patients with high levels of need. A key policy concern is that patients receive high quality care. Policymakers have attempted to influence hospital quality in different ways. This chapter focuses on three key policy levers: the extent to which hospital competition and higher hospital tariffs (of the DRG type) can stimulate quality, and whether non-profit hospitals provide higher or lower quality than for-profit ones. The chapter outlines key methodological challenges and selectively reviews the main findings from the literature. While several studies suggest that hospital competition reduces mortality rates for heart attack cases when hospital tariffs are fixed (under a DRG system), at this stage is unclear whether the effect holds across a range of quality indicators. Moreover, the limited literature on hospital mergers tends to suggest that hospital quality does not change following a merger. Finally, whether non-profit hospitals provide higher or lower quality varies across regions and institutional arrangements. The economic theory suggests several mechanisms with opposite effects on quality. To guide policy, future work needs to further unpack the various mechanisms through which these three key policy issues affect hospitals incentives.