Evaluation of Educational Services Quality for Healthcare Services Management Students of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences Based on SERVQUAL Model

Introduction: Developing a system of higher education regardless of increasing the quality will bring about outcomes such as academic failure, scientific dependency, brain drain, lack of entrepreneurship and poor knowledge generation. Considering the importance of educational services quality, the aim of this study was to evaluate the quality of educational services from the viewpoints of healthcare services management students of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences based on SERVQUAL model. Methods: This descriptive cross sectional study was carried out at the School of Management and Medical Information in Isfahan University of Medical Sciences in 2014. The population consisted of all students studying at different levels of health services management field (N=96) because of the limited population, available sampling was employed at that period of time (census method). The standard SERVQUAL questionnaire including two parts of demographic information and the five dimensions of service quality was used for data collection. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics tests, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, t-test and one-way ANOVA. Results: Findings showed that more than half of the respondents (57.7%) evaluated the quality of educational services as bad and there was a negative gap between student’s expectations and their perceptions in all dimensions of educational services quality with the greatest gap related to empathy (-1.08). Conclusion: Given the negative gaps in all dimensions of educational services quality, it is recommended that some actions such as providing training workshops for faculty members, consultants and staff should be taken to improve their technical and communicational skills and student-centered view should be taken into account in educational planning.