Does healthcare service quality affect outbound medical tourists’ satisfaction and loyalty? Experience from a developing country

Abstract

Purpose Poor quality of services in the health-care sector of the developing countries like Bangladesh forces affluent patients to seek advanced medical treatment from abroad. The purpose of this study is to explore the outbound medical tourists’ satisfaction and loyalty on the basis of the quality of the health-care service provided by foreign medical institutions. Design/methodology/approach The medical tourists from Bangladesh who have got medical services from Indian medical institutions were taken as a sample by applying a purposive sampling technique. For the measurement of outbound medical tourists’ satisfaction, the dimensions of the HEALTHQUAL model were adopted. A self-administrated questionnaire was the major tool for collecting data from the respondents. Using partial least square-structural equation model multivariate statistical technique and with the aid of SmartPLS software, primary data collected from 218 final respondents were analyzed. Findings The findings of this study reveal that four dimensions of the HEALTHQUAL model, namely, empathy, tangibility, efficiency, and safety have a significant positive impact on building medical tourists’ overall satisfaction, and then the overall satisfaction also has a positive level of significance on building loyalty towards foreign medical service providers. Practical implications The findings of this study can be a helpful instrument for the developing countries to rethink and reshuffle their own existing health-care system for providing quality medical services and at the same time, the medical tourists importing countries to sharpen their existing service quality as well as to attract more medical tourists in the future. Originality/value A handful of research has been carried out, especially focused on health-care service quality measurement and the relationship of health-care service quality with satisfaction and loyalty from the perspective of developing countries outbound medical tourists. Thus, this research work will give a flavor to think of health-care service quality in a different dimension.

Trust factors and their impact on patients satisfaction of private clinics in city of Ramadi - Iraq

“…This states (There is a statistically significant effect of service quality on patient satisfaction), as increasing the quality of service by one unit leads to an increase in patient satisfaction by (0.284), an S.E (0.040) and a C.R (7.124), This verifies the third sub-validity, hypotheses and the findings of this hypothesis are congruent with the results of [66] and study [50].…”

“…They are mentioned in Every single research , that deals with service quality from that date until now, in addition to the model (SERVPERF) prepared by [48], and other models of various research ers that are distinctive contributions to enriching the quality of service. Several relevant studies have shown the general implications or benefits of medical providers in general when they are interested in the quality of service, showing that there is a positive impact relationship between quality of service and patient satisfaction based on the results of the Study [49,50]. The higher the quality of service, the higher the service provider's performance index [51].…”

“…It is a complex phenomenon associated with personal expectations, experiences, preferences, and the health status of patients [55]. This makes it not an easy process to measure because it is related to the psychological state of patients through positive and negative thinking in the minds of patients but extends to their families and general assessment of aspects of service [50]. In the relevant literature, two or two types of patient satisfaction have emerged, the first is known as the satisfaction of the transactions that occur or is expressed through the patient's assessment of his experience of visiting for the first time (immediate realization) of the service provided, while the second is called cumulative satisfaction (general satisfaction) and expressed through the patient's assessment of an experience over time and the visit of the service provider more than once [56].…”

Outbound medical tourists: The interplay of perceived quality, length of stay, group-size, post-visit destination image and revisit intention

“…[ 13 ] and [ 46 ], using a purposive sample of Bangladeshi medical tourists to India, showed that healthcare service quality positively influences medical tourists’ satisfaction, which in turn affects their loyalty, i.e., revisit intention and intention to recommend. However, the satisfaction and loyalty measured in the aforementioned studies were specific to the medical facility, not for the destination as a whole.…”

“…While previous research has investigated multiple areas within medical tourism, the majority of these studies have focused on first-time destination choice or visit intention [ 10 – 12 ], with only a limited number of research studies evaluating the revisit intentions of medical tourists [ 7 , 13 ]. Moreover, much of the previous research has used evaluations of the overall destination image instead of looking into specific components of the tourists’ post-visit destination image [ 14 ].…”