Questionnaire design
When designing the pilot questionnaire, the 22 items in the SERVQUAL questionnaire developed by Parasuraman et al. (1985) were referred to. Some modifications and adaptations were made to selected questions to make them more relevant to hospital services. The 22 items used by Youssef et al. (1996) in the evaluation of healthcare quality in the NHS were also referred to. This was the first time the internationally used market research techniquehad been used in Singapore to identify patients’ expectations and perceptions of Singapore hospitals’ service quality. The pilot questionnaires which consisted of 22 questions in five dimensions: tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy, were given to five in‐house patients, five out‐patients, five observers, five CEOs/doctors of two hospitals for their invaluable feedback. Based on the feedback received from the pilot survey, the final questionnaire rephrased ambiguous questions and an additional dimension, “accessibility and affordability” was included. The final questionnaire, as shown in the Appendix, contained an “expectations” section with 25 statements and a “perceptions” section consisting of a set of matching statements. In addition to the 25 statements in each of the two sections, the questionnaire also had a question on “overall importance” in the “expectations” section and another question on “overall rating of service quality” in the “perceptions” section. The statements in both the expectations and perceptions sections were grouped into the following six dimensions, each with a range of pertinent statements
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