Patient perceptions of healthcare service quality in Romania: Public versus private hospitals – Implications for developed and developing healthcare systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective: Recent increases in per capita income and longevity in Central and Eastern European counties (CEECs), alongside a slow-changing soviet-era public healthcare system, has led to the emergence of private hospitals. This paper investigates the differential patient service quality perceptions for private versus public hospitals, as well as for three types of healthcare services: primary, ambulatory, and inpatient care.Methods: Data from 1,673 patients of private and public hospitals in the capital of Romania were collected in face-to-face interviews. Analysis of covariance and partial-least-squares techniques were used to examine the relationships between perceived service quality, hospital ownership status and the type of health service patients received.Results: Over 70% of women prefer private health facilities to public hospitals (compared to less than 30% of men). While private hospitals rank higher than public hospitals on most attributes, the interaction effect of gender and hospital type reveals that assurance and empathy are the only significant attributes in driving women to private hospitals. (Physical facilities and staff appearance) as well as intangible dimensions of service quality (assurance, responsiveness, reliability, and empathy) have a positive impact on perceived overall service quality of healthcare. Improvements in perceptions of hospital’s tangibles, staff’s responsiveness and empathy have the greatest potential to enhance perceived overall service quality.Conclusions: This paper demonstrates the importance of breaking down health services into various sub-categories both in terms of perceived healthcare attributes and in terms of tangible healthcare facilities, such as public and private hospitals.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".