| Sub-title | |
| Author | Marion Rizzo |
| Abstract | Clinical laboratories are an important component of any modern health care system. Such laboratories are staffed and run by scientific and medical laboratory professionals trained in their respective specialities. The range and variety of the laboratory services provided have traditionally been determined solely by the knowledge and views of laboratory professionals. This also holds true for the organisation and delivery of the laboratory services, as well as the evaluation of the quality of the service. Such a state of affairs has a number of implications which could significantly reduce the effectiveness of a clinical laboratory service. This study investigates whether, and in what ways, customer involvement contributes to the quality of a clinical laboratory service. A review of management and marketing literature was carried out to investigate the same situation in other service organisations, especially those providing professional services. This was complemented by a review of the literature on service quality in clinical laboratories, to determine whether the concepts and techniques used by other service organisations can be applied to a clinical laboratory setting. The main findings were as follows. There are two main areas in which customer involvement is essential - in the design of a service and in the evaluation of a service. At the design stage, customers should be consulted so that both the actual services and the delivery systems possess the features that meet customer requirements. The evaluation of a service organisation encompasses internal evaluation and customer evaluation. Most professional service organisations have well-developed internal evaluation procedures that focus on technical quality. Excellent technical quality, however, does not guarantee that the service provided is also excellent from the customer's point of view. In fact, it has been pointed out that customers lack the necessary training to judge the technical quality of a professional service. They tend to take the technical quality for granted, and evaluate the service by other criteria related to, for example, service delivery. Market researchers have developed various constructs related to customer evaluation of services, the most significant being customer satisfaction and service quality. Both service quality and satisfaction are performance evaluations that measure the difference between customer expectations and perceptions of service actually received. The most critical difference between the two constructs is that service quality is an enduring and overall judgement about the superiority of the service, whereas satisfaction is transitory and related to a specific encounter with the service. Thus service quality confers particular advantages in long-term evaluations. Many types of service organisations carry out customer evaluations by measuring customer perceptions of service quality. The instrument most widely used for these measurements is SERVQUAL. The marketing conceptualisation of service quality is applicable to a clinical laboratory service, however it can only be implemented if there is a means to measure service quality in this context. At present, such an instrument is lacking. Moreover, this instrument must be designed so as to satisfy standard measurement criteria of reliability and validity. A detailed outline of a research project aimed at developing an instrument for the measurement of service quality in clinical laboratories is presented. The report concludes with a discussion of the practical uses that the laboratory manager may make of the information yielded by service quality measurements. |
Published in: | |
| Journal | |
| Volume | |
| Pages | - |
| Date | |
| Link to journal | |
| Key words | Service, Quality, Clinical Laboratories, Thesis, Health Services Management |