ABSTRACT
Introduction: Patient satisfaction is crucial to the long-run success in health care center. With regard to the highest patients' referral to the emergency department and the existing challenges due to the patient s need to urgent care, we aimed to evaluate health care services quality in this unit to find out whether the patients have different expectations from health care providers and if they perceive some dimensions of care more important than others
Method: The SERVQUAL scale method was used in this cross-sectional study on 100 patients in June 2015. Patient satisfaction questionnaire based on SERVQUAL model was evaluated with high content validity and the reliability was 0.97 and 0.81
The data collected were analyzed using SPSS, version 20.0 [IBM, USA]. Statistical analyses included descriptive statistics, paired and independence sample t-test and ANOVA at the significance level 0.05
Results-.The results showed that the quality gap in all dimensions was significant [P<0.001]. The largest quality gap was related to responsiveness [-1.08] and the lowest belonged to assurance [-0.8]. Demographic characteristics were analyzed and the number of referrals was significant in tangibility and assurance dimensions [P = 0.04]; also, in all cases the patients' expectations [total Mean=4.35] were higher than their perception [total Mean = 3.295]
Conclusion: In order to improve emergency services, it is recommended that the hospital management should provide appropriate facilities, reduce waiting time, increase in attention to ordering system based on the patients' condition, and improve the behavior of health care personnel to patient is placed on the agenda of hospital management