Introduction: Today, service quality and patient loyalty have a critical impact on the performance of health-care organizations. The present study aimed to make a survey on the relationship between outpatient service quality and patients’ loyalty in selected general public hospitals affiliated to Shiraz University of Medical Sciences in 2012.
Methods and Materials: In this descriptive, analytical and cross sectional study, 256 cases of the outpatients were investigated in four public hospitals in Shiraz. The Standard questionnaires were used as data collection tool. Data were analyzed using SPSS.18 software and descriptive statistics including Spearman’s Correlation Coefficient and pair t-test.
Results: The findings revealed a meaningful difference between the patients’ perception and expectation in all dimensions of SERVQUAL. The patients rated ‘reliability’ to have a high gap (- 2,62) and ‘accessibility’ as the least (-1,34). Among loyalty dimensions they ranked positive word-of-mouth approach as the most important (4,1) and price sensitivity as the least important (1,81). The results of Pearson Correlation Test revealed that overall quality and loyalty dimensions were correlated (p<0.05).
Conclusions: This study showed that quality of outpatient services in hospitals were lower than patients’ expectations and there was a noticeable gap between expectations and perceptions, given the strong correlation between quality of services and loyalty dimensions. In addition, implementation of patient loyalty program would mediate service quality influence on a patient’s loyalty.