Hoteling Services Quality in Teaching Hospitals of Iran: Model Development and Validation

Background Based on the importance of quality of hospital hoteling services on health system outcomes and lack of a valid assessment method to determine and implement the required strategies to evaluate and improve the service quality, the current study aimed at determining factors affecting the quality of hoteling services in teaching hospitals affiliated to universities in Iran. Methods The current cross sectional study was designed in 2 phases of qualitative and quantitative. In the 1st phase, factors affecting the quality of hospital hoteling services were extracted from the literature and through an in-depth interview with 11 experts (6 from healthcare administration and 5 from the Iranian hoteling industry organization).In the 2nd phase, the data from the 1st phase were integrated and a model for the improvement of the quality of hospital hoteling service was designed. The model was validated through a qualitative (expert opinion) and quantitative approaches (exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis). The data of the factor analysis were collected from 960 patients in 10 teaching hospitals from 10 different cities across the country. Results The findings of the current study indicated that 11 factors (physical, functional, economical, human factor, social welfare services, clinical welfare services, safety, cultural, personnel identification, patient guide factors, and healthcare services) explained 65.81% of the variances in the quality of hoteling services. Based on the conformity factor analysis, functional and personnel identification factors with a coefficient of 0.953 and 0.779 had the highest and lowest weight to explain the variance of the quality of the hoteling services, respectively, in the teaching hospitals affiliated to different medical universities in Iran. Conclusions Hoteling services quality model has a multidimensional construct and in the current study 11 important ones were identified, out of which functional and personnel identification factors had the highest and lowest weight in explaining the variance of the stated construct.