The survey quality of health services delivered in health care homes in Khoy,Iran :from the viewpoints of clients

Abstract

Background & objective: Delivering favorable and quality services in the health systems is very important. Understanding the expectations and perceptions of the people helps improve the quality of services. The aim of this study was to evaluate the quality of health services delivered in health care homes of Khoy from the viewpoint of clients. Methods: In this cross sectional study, two‐step clustering study was conducted in 20 health care homes on 420 randomly selected health care services recipients. The expectations and perceptions of the recipients of the services in 5 dimensions tangibles, reliability, accountability, assurance, and empathy were collected using standard questionnaire SERVQUAL. Results: 42.6% of the clients were less than 30 years old. 81% of the clients were female .The levels of services recipients' expectations about the quality of health services in all aspects of quality were higher than their perceptions. Service recipients ranked assurance dimension as the most important dimension and physical and tangible components of the services as the least important dimension of health services. Based on perception, the most desirable dimension was quality assurance, and the most undesirable dimension in terms of quality was tangibles. There was a significant statistical association between services recipients’ age, ethnicity, duration of service use, and perceptions and their expectations about quality dimensions (p < 0.05). Conclusion : Expectations of the clients in all dimensions of services delivery are beyond their perceptions, and the quality of services delivery should be improved in these centers in all the dimensions especially tangibles. It is recommended that the quality of the services delivery be assessed periodically and certain interventions be conducted to improve the delivery of health services in these health care homes.