Abstract
Customer loyalty, with satisfaction of customers as its main precondition, has long been regarded as an overarching goal of service businesses. With the proliferation of health care providers, which brought about rising competitive pressures on the market, the issue of how to satisfy and keep patients has been attracting increasing attention of researchers and health care management. Therefore, this study aims to examine the antecedents of patient satisfaction and its direct and mediated impact on patients' behavioural intentions in thus far under-studied context of emerging economy's health care system. The study has been conducted in a primary health care setting, on a convenience sample of 300 patients, by means of structured questionnaire. The application of structural equation modelling (SEM) revealed direct impact of health care service quality on patient satisfaction and its mediated impact on satisfaction, via perceived value of health care services. In addition to direct influence of satisfaction on patients' behavioural intentions, its total effect on positive intentions of patients is increased by the impact of patient commitment to a health care provider, which, as evidenced by this study's findings, increases with patient's rising trust into a health care provider. Implications for theory and practice are discussed and further research directions are provided.
Highlights
Customer loyalty, with satisfaction of customers as its main precondition, has long been regarded as an overarching goal of service businesses
The construct of perceived value has not been extensively studied in a health care setting, some empirical evidence suggests significant impact of health care service quality on perceived value of services and positive impact of both constructs on patient satisfaction (Choi et al, 2004; Sumaedi et al, 2016)
Perceived value is generally regarded as one of the key aspects of consumer experience, in comparison with service quality and satisfaction, it has unjustifiably received far less research attention (Pevec & Pisnik, 2017). When it comes to health care services, the delivery of superior value to patients and patient satisfaction have been recognized as primary objectives of contemporary health care systems (Materla et al, 2019)
Summary
Health care services evince all unique characteristics of services, such as intangibility, perishability, inseparability of production and consumption and variability of services (Arasli et al, 2008; Berry et al, 2008; Naidu, 2009; Chang et al, 2013). Related to the information asymmetry is an agency relationship in a health care, which implies that a principal, i.e. a patient, delegates authority to an agent, i.e. a physician, who becomes responsible for making decisions in patient’s best interest (Folland et al, 2017). When it comes to credence services, quality of interaction significantly shapes customers’ perceptions of service quality, i.e. service personnel who are friendly, polite and show empathy towards customers are considered crucial drivers of customer satisfaction (Choi & Kim, 2013; Naik Jandavath & Byram, 2016). As patients lack skills to evaluate technical quality of health care services, according to Alrubaiee and Alkaa'ida (2011) they rely on interpersonal relations to infer quality judgments
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