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Drawing upon the stimulus-organism-response model, this study aims to explore the impact of soft aspects of service quality on revisit intention through the mechanism of perceived empathy.

For the examination of the hypothesized relationships, the study adopts structural equation modelling to analyse the data of 562 respondents (i.e. 281 family members and 281 inpatients).

The empirical results suggest that service quality increased family member empathy perception, which, in turn, improved inpatients’ revisit intentions.

Past studies have focused on the roles of overall service quality. The authors have extended the literature by examining the specific but important aspect of service quality and its effects on emotional response. Importantly, the study explains that the affective reactions of a patient’s family, fastened with perceived empathy, have a central role in influencing the patients’ subsequent reactions. Moreover, the prior studies collected the data either from hospital employees or patients. However, in the present study, the authors used a unique sample (family members as well as patients) to have a deeper understanding. Thus, the study enhances the literature on the stimuli-response (i.e. service quality – revisit intentions) relationship in the context of service marketing in general and health care in specific. Important academic and managerial contributions and recommendations for future research are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate service quality in a UK privately funded alcohol treatment clinic.

Data were gathered via interviews with two groups of participants using the SERVQUAL questionnaire. The first group comprised 32 patients and the second 15 clinic staff. The SERVQUAL instrument measures service quality expectations and perceptions across five service dimensions and identifies gaps between service expectations and perceptions of what was delivered.

Patients' service quality expectations were exceeded on four of five dimensions. However, staff members felt services fell below expectations on four of five dimensions with the “reliability” service dimension emerging as the common service element falling below expectations for both participant groups. It was concluded that achieving consistent service delivery and increasing empathy between staff and patients improves overall service quality perceptions.

The paper relies on self‐report methods from a relatively small number of individuals.

There have been limited research studies measuring alcohol treatment service quality in the private sector.

Describes a diagnostic instrument which measures the satisfaction of internal customers of staff units. Determines the critical quality characters of staff processes and presents a philosophy of staff quality management.

Describes the quality journey that began as quality control circles, moved to implement an international quality management system, and now continues its TQM programme called “Quest for excellence”. Kowloon‐Canton Railway Corporation is the first railway company in Asia to have a part of its operations ISO 9001 certified. Examines some of the important lessons learned when several hundred non‐English‐speaking employees were required to be involved in the process of preparing for certification.

Quality of care and health professional burnout are important issues in their own right, however, relatively few studies have examined both. The purpose of this paper is to explore quality of care and health professional burnout in hospital settings.

The paper is a narrative literature review of quality of care and health professional burnout in hospital settings published in peer-reviewed journals between January 2000 and March 2013. Papers were identified via a search of PsychInfo, PubMed, Embase and CINNAHL electronic databases. In total, 30 papers which measured and/or discussed both quality of care and health professional burnout were identified.

The paper provides insight into the key health workforce-planning issues, specifically staffing levels and workloads, which impact upon health professional burnout and quality of care. The evidence from the review literature suggests that health professionals face heavier and increasingly complex workloads, even when staffing levels and/or patient-staff ratios remain unchanged.

The narrative literature review suggests that weak retention rates, high turnover, heavy workloads, low staffing levels and/or staffing shortages conspire to create a difficult working environment for health professionals, one in which they may struggle to provide high-quality care and which may also contribute to health professional burnout. The review demonstrates that health workforce planning concerns, such as these, impact on health professional burnout and on the ability of health professionals to deliver quality care. The review also demonstrates that most of the published papers published between 2000 and 2013 addressing health professional burnout and quality of care were nursing focused.

Explores the Total Quality programme adopted by the National Health Service, highlighting the issues which make sustaining the commitment of all staff to quality improvement processes possible. Discusses the tension created by linking quality improvement to reducing quality costs of health care. Outlines the timetabling of strategy development and implementation, and the management of he timetabled process. Reviews key milestones in staff awareness, looking at co‐ordination and management of quality improvement activities; understanding of the design/conformance/corrective action cycle; understanding of the relationship between quality improvement and costs; and sustaining involvement of staff. Suggests that despite concerns from clinicians and managers alike, regarding the pressures involved with implementing TQM, a successful team should improve service to the patient.

Policy‐makers are looking to after‐school programmes to improve family and child wellbeing and are searching for evidence‐based ways to improve the quality of after‐school programmes. This study examines whether the Good Behaviour Game, a behaviour management curriculum designed for school classrooms, can be easily migrated to academically focused after‐school programmes. Our results are based on programme observations, qualitative interviews and ratings of implementation fidelity. We describe the structure and activities in these after‐school programmes and then identify challenges to implementing and evaluating classroom‐based interventions in the after‐school setting.

Centres on the promotion of quality in schools and ways by which best practice in industry can be applied in education. Explores definitions, procedures, assessment methods and analyses what can be learned from major theorists on the subject and the experience of industry. Drawing from information gathered during an industrial placement in a major chemical company, compares attitudes and practices with those of staff in a Calderdale junior school. In both (the industrial settings and educational setting) attitudes and priorities with regard to quality appear very similar. It could be concluded from the study that quality requires commitment from the top, it should involve and be owned by all staff in the organization and that a culture of searching for continuous improvement should prevail. Such an approach would have a greater impact on standards, performance and, most importantly, identifying training needs in education if theory and practice from industry can be regarded as relevant and comparable.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of service quality toward public satisfaction and public trust on local government in Indonesia.

A quantitative approach was used to achieve the objectives of the study. The study consisted of nine exogenous variables and one endogenous variable. The exogenous variables were delivery, timeliness, information, professionalism, staff attitude, organizational politics, internal roles, external roles and citizen satisfaction, while the endogenous variable was public trust toward the regional government. The samples were taken using two sampling methods, cluster sampling technique and proportional stratified random sampling technique. The cluster sampling was institutional sample in which the researchers selected 2 out of 11 regencies in West Sumatra, and 2 out of 7 cities in West Sumatra. The regencies were Pasaman Barat and Tanah Datar and the cities were Padang Panjang and Padang. In the lower level, there were ten nagari and ten lurah. On the second stage, the sample was selected using the proportional stratified random sampling technique that had been set at the first stage. Slovin formula with 2 percent of errors was used to determine the number of samples. The total respondents in this study were 4,177 respondents.

The hypothetical model can be used as a new model for public service that was provided by the local governments (cities and districts) and it was able to increase citizen satisfaction and citizen trust with local government, especially in the basic need services such as education and health as described in Figure 1. In order to increase public satisfaction on the basic needs, such as education and health services, regional government should improve delivery, timeliness of service, availability of information, staff professionalism, staff attitude, external and internal roles of manager and at the same time minimize organizational politics within the local government. Furthermore, it is also evident in this model that increasing public satisfaction on basic services can increase public confidence toward regional government. The finding that shows the novelty of this research is the internal and external role of managers in improving public satisfaction and trust in regional government. Meanwhile, the addition of internal political as variable is a development to improve the existing models.

Regional government should reconstruct their basic public service in order to meet need of the public. No previous study has comprehensively studied the relationship between interaction quality, physical environmental quality, and outcome quality to public satisfaction and its implication to public trust, especially in Indonesia.

Features a case study of a major bank which aimed to achieve corporate transformation and a dramatic improvement in service quality. The links between service quality, customer satisfaction and corporate profitability in UK banking are outlined in order to set in context the many quality improvement initiatives undertaken by UK retail banks in recent years. Business process re‐engineering has proved to be the most popular of service quality initiatives but most have been limited to single processes rather than corporate transformation as portrayed in the case study. The five‐year corporate transformation programme focuses on employee communications, the redesign of work, recruitment and reward processes and the introduction of consumer research‐based national quality standards. The bank was rewarded for its efforts, coming top for three consecutive years in the Which? service quality surveys and, according to its own data, which contributed to a rise in customer satisfaction and customer retention at a time of declining employee satisfaction. Future developments in service quality segmentation and a working definition of service quality are proposed.