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Testing the Strength of Hospital Accreditation as a Signal of the Quality of Care in Romania: Do Patients’ and Health Professionals’ Perceptions Align?

Hospital accreditation, as a quality signal, is gaining its popularity among low- and middle-income countries, such as Romania, despite its costly nature. Nevertheless, its effectiveness as a quality signal in driving patients’ choice of hospital services remains unclear. In this study, we intend to...

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Autores principales: Druică, Elena, Wu, Bingyi, Cepoi, Vasile, Mihăilă, Viorel, Burcea, Marin
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7551154/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32961807
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare8030349
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author Druică, Elena
Wu, Bingyi
Cepoi, Vasile
Mihăilă, Viorel
Burcea, Marin
author_facet Druică, Elena
Wu, Bingyi
Cepoi, Vasile
Mihăilă, Viorel
Burcea, Marin
author_sort Druică, Elena
collection PubMed
description Hospital accreditation, as a quality signal, is gaining its popularity among low- and middle-income countries, such as Romania, despite its costly nature. Nevertheless, its effectiveness as a quality signal in driving patients’ choice of hospital services remains unclear. In this study, we intend to empirically explore the perceptions of both healthcare professionals and patients toward Romanian hospital accreditation and identify perception gaps between the two parties. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were carried out to extract the latent constructs of health professionals’ perceived effects of hospital accreditation. The Wilcoxon rank-sum test and Kruskal–Wallis test were used to identify correlations between patients’ sociodemographic characteristics and their behavioral intentions when confronted with low-quality services. We found that health professionals believe that hospital accreditation plays a positive role in improving patient satisfaction, institutional reputation, and healthcare services quality. However, we found a lack of awareness of hospital accreditation status among patients, indicating the existence of the perception gap of the accreditation effectiveness as a market signal. Our results suggest that the effect of interpersonal trust in current service providers may distract patients from the accreditation status. Our study provides important practical implications for Romanian hospitals on enhancing the quality of accreditation signal and suggests practical interventions.
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spelling pubmed-75511542020-10-16 Testing the Strength of Hospital Accreditation as a Signal of the Quality of Care in Romania: Do Patients’ and Health Professionals’ Perceptions Align? Druică, Elena Wu, Bingyi Cepoi, Vasile Mihăilă, Viorel Burcea, Marin Healthcare (Basel) Article Hospital accreditation, as a quality signal, is gaining its popularity among low- and middle-income countries, such as Romania, despite its costly nature. Nevertheless, its effectiveness as a quality signal in driving patients’ choice of hospital services remains unclear. In this study, we intend to empirically explore the perceptions of both healthcare professionals and patients toward Romanian hospital accreditation and identify perception gaps between the two parties. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were carried out to extract the latent constructs of health professionals’ perceived effects of hospital accreditation. The Wilcoxon rank-sum test and Kruskal–Wallis test were used to identify correlations between patients’ sociodemographic characteristics and their behavioral intentions when confronted with low-quality services. We found that health professionals believe that hospital accreditation plays a positive role in improving patient satisfaction, institutional reputation, and healthcare services quality. However, we found a lack of awareness of hospital accreditation status among patients, indicating the existence of the perception gap of the accreditation effectiveness as a market signal. Our results suggest that the effect of interpersonal trust in current service providers may distract patients from the accreditation status. Our study provides important practical implications for Romanian hospitals on enhancing the quality of accreditation signal and suggests practical interventions. MDPI 2020-09-19 /pmc/articles/PMC7551154/ /pubmed/32961807 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare8030349 Text en © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Druică, Elena
Wu, Bingyi
Cepoi, Vasile
Mihăilă, Viorel
Burcea, Marin
Testing the Strength of Hospital Accreditation as a Signal of the Quality of Care in Romania: Do Patients’ and Health Professionals’ Perceptions Align?
title Testing the Strength of Hospital Accreditation as a Signal of the Quality of Care in Romania: Do Patients’ and Health Professionals’ Perceptions Align?
title_full Testing the Strength of Hospital Accreditation as a Signal of the Quality of Care in Romania: Do Patients’ and Health Professionals’ Perceptions Align?
title_fullStr Testing the Strength of Hospital Accreditation as a Signal of the Quality of Care in Romania: Do Patients’ and Health Professionals’ Perceptions Align?
title_full_unstemmed Testing the Strength of Hospital Accreditation as a Signal of the Quality of Care in Romania: Do Patients’ and Health Professionals’ Perceptions Align?
title_short Testing the Strength of Hospital Accreditation as a Signal of the Quality of Care in Romania: Do Patients’ and Health Professionals’ Perceptions Align?
title_sort testing the strength of hospital accreditation as a signal of the quality of care in romania: do patients’ and health professionals’ perceptions align?
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7551154/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32961807
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/healthcare8030349
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