Towards Healthcare Service Quality: An Understanding of the Usability Concept in Healthcare Design

The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on "usability concept" in built environment and healthcare design, and suggest a possible usability conceptual framework in achieving quality service. This paper will focus on three usability keys factors: efficiency, effectiveness and user's satisfaction. This overview will help future researchers to investigate the relationship between spatial design and "usability concept" from the user's experience and expectation of the outpatient area as part of the Malaysian Primary Healthcare (MPHC) service in a public hospital. This usability is useful in improving outpatient area service outcome, which is more valuable to the end-users. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies(cE-Bs), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia