OVERVIEW OF THE QUALITY OF SECONDARY HEALTH CARE SERVQUAL MEASURING INSTRUMENTS

Improving the quality in health care institutions is a segment of quality management focused on increasing the ability to meet the requirements. Health care quality meets the needs of users, professional needs and achieves set objectives, and uses the resources in the most efficient manner. Quality assurance requires determining the procedures used, the method of checking within the system and quality control which includes verification of realized procedures set in place to ensure quality. Quality in health care is an example of good practice of adoption and improvement of standards, processes and outcomes. Improving quality requires knowledge and skills with a focus on lifelong learning, adaptation of patients' needs and values. The aim of this paper is to present marketing and quality of secondary healthcare services in the City of Vukovar and Croatian Veterans Hospitalby applying the SERVQUAL instrument. Research has shown how much importance Croatian veterans attach to dimensions of quality of services and whether there are differences and discrepancies between perceptions and expectations regarding the provision of services at the hospital. The result showed significantly higher scores in expectations in relation to the perception in all dimensions of the SERVQUAL model (Student's t-test, p < 0.001). As expected, the highest score was achieved in the category Reliability, while the lowest was achieved for the category Tangible elements, while in the category of perception the lowest score was achieved for Understanding for the users', and the highest was achieved for Tangible elements. This paper can encourage hospital management to contemplate future quality measurements in order to identify the parameters of quality with an aim of achieving improvement. Quality is the responsibility of everyone within the organization, poor quality is expensive because of the inefficiency of people within the system.