Service quality measurement in health care supply chains

Service Quality in the Health Care Supply Chains

What are the strengths and weaknesses of Sam's decision to use focus groups to generate a list of service quality measures rather than relying on a prevalidated instrument such as SERVQUAL?

Focus groups draw upon a limited selection of individuals, and may reflect the subjective bias of the group. The presence of the group itself will influence individual responses and a lack of diversity may thus be manifest in the questionnaire. Additionally, focus groups may be less than honest and try to please the individual interviewing them, rather than actually give their true opinions. Using several focus groups to generate a list of questions, rather than just one, may minimize some of these tendencies.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using a questionnaire to obtain data on the importance of the measures and perceptions of performance?

Questionnaires generate sets of easily comparable sets of data. However, they are also blunt instruments, with limited responses and shades of meaning. This is problematic when measuring something like perceptions of organizational performance. No amount of questions can encompass individual's emotions and feelings, and no number on a scale can completely encompass shades of meaning in general. In fact, too many available responses and questions can result in hasty responses, in contrast to a phone interview, where the respondent can be forced to explain and qualify his or her answers. Also, ratings of performance on a questionnaire can be highly subjective, and one person's rating of 'excellent' may be another person's 'acceptable.'

How can Sam maximize the response rate to the survey?