Abstract
Hospital accreditation, as a quality signal, is gaining its popularity among low- and middle-income countries, such as Romania, despite its costly nature. Nevertheless, its effectiveness as a quality signal in driving patients’ choice of hospital services remains unclear. In this study, we intend to empirically explore the perceptions of both healthcare professionals and patients toward Romanian hospital accreditation and identify perception gaps between the two parties. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were carried out to extract the latent constructs of health professionals’ perceived effects of hospital accreditation. The Wilcoxon rank-sum test and Kruskal–Wallis test were used to identify correlations between patients’ sociodemographic characteristics and their behavioral intentions when confronted with low-quality services. We found that health professionals believe that hospital accreditation plays a positive role in improving patient satisfaction, institutional reputation, and healthcare services quality. However, we found a lack of awareness of hospital accreditation status among patients, indicating the existence of the perception gap of the accreditation effectiveness as a market signal. Our results suggest that the effect of interpersonal trust in current service providers may distract patients from the accreditation status. Our study provides important practical implications for Romanian hospitals on enhancing the quality of accreditation signal and suggests practical interventions.
Highlights
The need for reforming the Romanian healthcare system and improving the quality of care has been an important concern for the last 30 years, since the fall of the communist regime [1,2]
Hospital accreditation programs are defined as systematic assessments of hospitals against a series of quality standards [12] and have been pursued as an intervention for hospitals to improve their quality of healthcare outcomes
Overall, health professionals believe that hospital accreditation resulted in positive effects on increased patient satisfaction, better hospital reputation, higher quality of medical care, and improvements in administrative services
Summary
The need for reforming the Romanian healthcare system and improving the quality of care has been an important concern for the last 30 years, since the fall of the communist regime [1,2]. Accreditation has gained popularity in enhancing healthcare quality in low- and middle-income countries [7] International organizations such as the World Health Organization (through the National Quality Policy and Strategy, or the WHO Patient Safety Program), the EU Health. Hospital accreditation programs are defined as systematic assessments of hospitals against a series of quality standards [12] and have been pursued as an intervention for hospitals to improve their quality of healthcare outcomes (e.g., the process of care and patient satisfaction). It is favored in terms of the positive results, the accreditation processes can be costly. Hospitals shall pay the total amount in three installments over the entire evaluation timeline—the first 30%, the second 40%, and the remaining 30%
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