Emergency Service Quality Assessment Using SERVQUAL and BWM

Understanding the perceptions and needs of patients regarding the quality of the emergency department (ED) is crucial for enhancing the performance of provided health care services. As an acknowledged quality measurement method in many industries, SERVQUAL has been used for hospitals and EDs. Although it is convenient to define the gaps between customer expectations and the quality of received services, SERVQUAL requires an explicit prioritization strategy to decide between further actions. In addition, this method heavily relies on self-reported data from participants who might be subject to many behavioral anomalies while assigning direct values to their expectations. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel service quality measurement methodology by integrating the SERVQUAL method with Best-Worst Method (BWM). First, by treating the five main dimensions of the SERVQUAL method as our main criteria, we identified several ED-specific sub-criteria and structured a questionnaire following the BWM procedure. Then by analyzing the collected data, the weights of the main and sub-attributes were calculated and discussed. The results show that Reliability and Assurance are the two most important attributes for both patience and accompanying people with patients while evaluating ED service quality. The main contribution of this study is providing insights into the quality measurement of healthcare services from a multi-criteria decision-making perspective and helping practitioners and researchers design patient-oriented services.