A Call for a Holistic Approach to Measuring Quality in Healthcare Services

Abstract

Quality in healthcare is a construct whose measurement is vital for quality assurance and improvement purposes. However, achieving a holistic view of quality in healthcare settings can be challenged by having multiple stakeholders involved, such as patients, healthcare providers and managers, with each having different viewpoints and priorities. Whilst service marketing and quality-of-care literature offer a plethora of quality-measuring models that show similarities, each discipline prioritises measuring quality as perceived by one stakeholder (e.g.: patients or service providers), thus offering a partial picture that does not necessarily capture the viewpoints of all stakeholders involved. Moreover, some models evaluate the overall quality of a service, rather than providing a detailed evaluation that captures the quality of different elements of care. Local context and culture are factors to consider as well when measuring quality. Therefore, this paper aims to propose an approach to measuring quality that captures the viewpoints of multiple stakeholders in a service setting. A customised model is constructed, based on comparing the basic elements of models derived from service marketing and quality-of-care literature. The elements are chosen to also reflect the contextual and cultural peculiarities of the service under evaluation, while ensuring that such a detailed approach remains practical upon application.