Assess the pros and cons of Sam’s decision to use focus groups to generate the list of questions for service quality in place of using standard scale, SERVQUAL.? During her degree placement Sam Jones spent a year working in the Purchasing Servicesdepartment of a local acute hospital National Health Service (NHS) Trust. During her time inthe organisation she saw at first hand the pressures faced by the organisation as it strove todeliver the vision of The NHS Plan (Department of Health, 2000) of a health service thatprovided timely, high-quality, value-for-money and patient-centred care. Specifically, shewitnessed the changes being introduced in relation to supply chain policy and practice as thePurchasing Services department responded to the challenge of delivering quality products andservices that met the needs of the end patient and other service users. Embarking on herresearch project Sam decided to focus on the topic of measuring service quality in health caresupply chains. During the placement the Head of Purchasing Services had expressed an inter-est in the topic as being both important and timely and had offered to assist in facilitating thecollecting of data. In addition, an initial review of the literature suggested that there was scopeto make a worthwhile contribution to knowledge by researching the topic.Having completed a review of the literature on supply chain management and service quality,Sam established an overarching aim of her research project, which was to measure and com-pare perceptions of service quality in health care supply chains. Through her reading of theliteracture and having undertaken some initial exploratory intervies with Purchasing Servicesstaff she had developed the following objectives for the research:i to establish how service quality is measured in health care supply chains;1 to investigate the factors that influence perceptions of service quality of differentpeople/groups within health care supply chain chains;i to establish how performance is reflected in the degree of alignment between measures andperceptions.A major issue facing Sam was deciding upon a unit of analysis. To do this she needed tounderstand how the supply chains worked. It soon became obvious that NHS supply chains arecomplex, spanning geographical locations and sectors, such as acute hospitals, primary careorganisations and health authorities; and encompassing diverse products and services, such aspersonnel, drugs and pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, information technology, transportand car parking. In order to be able to compare and contrast measures and perceptions shedecided that she needed to select different types of services. Therefore she chose to investigatethree services managed by the NHS Trust in which she had worked during her placement:personnel, transport and medical equipment. For each service she identified a supply chaincomprising of four groups: Primary Care Trust (patients and general practitioners), StrategicHealth Authority, the acute hospital NHS Trust, and a supplier to the hospital.To meet the research's first objective of establishing how service quality is measured Samconsidered undertaking a survey using a previously validated instrument, such as SERVQUAL(Parasuraman et al., 1985). This presented Sam with a dilemma. Whilst there were clearbenefits in terms of establishing external validity, with such instruments having been shownthrough prior research to contain measures of service quality that are appropriate to a widerange of situations, other literature suggested that such generic instruments may not providesufficient detail of the measures important in the health care context (for example: Robinson,1999). Judging that the limitations of using a previously validated instrument outweighed the benefits, Sam decided to undertake focus group meetings with each of the four groups in eachof the three supply chains (twelve meetings in total), to obtain data about the attributes used tomeasure service quality. After the meetings, Sam used content analysis to generate a numberof measures of service quality. On comparing the measures she had extracted from thedata with existing service quality constructs she was able to categorise them under headingssimilar to those used in SERVQUAL: Reliability, Assurance, Tangibles, Empathy andResponsiveness.Her next two research objectives required:1 data to be collected on perceptions of service quality;1 a comparison of measures of service quality and perceptions;1 analysis of the factors that influenced differences between measures and perceptions.In addition, Sam recognised that the measures she had generated through her focus groupsneeded further validation by a larger sample of people in each of the supply chains. Sam'sinitial thought was to carry out interviews to obtain a larger amount of data that would addressthe objectives and the issue of validity; however, she soon realised that this would be verycostly and time consuming in practice, and would not necessarily give her the data in a formsuitable for analysis. She therefore decided an appropriate approach for the remainder of theresearch would be to survey opinions and attitudes of people within the three supply chainsusing a questionnaire.To ensure the data gained from her questionnaire would be suitable for analysis, Sam utilisedthe Service Template process used in previous research (Williams et al., 1999). This allows theidentification and measurement of different dimensions and perceptions of service quality, andso fitted well with Sam's research objectives. In line with the Service Template process, Samdeveloped her questionnaire by first listing each measure of service qualityidentified through her focus groups as an item in the questionnaire. The importance of the itemwould be measured as an expectation, and the current performance against the item would berecorded as a perception. This would be recorded using a 10-point Likert scale, anchored byideal and worst situation descriptors which Sam could derive from her focus group meetings.This is illustrated in the following extract from Sam's questionnaire:For the Medical Equipment supply chain, please rate the following items on the scale below,with 10 representing the ideal situation and 1 the worst. For each item, use E to indicate yourexpected level of service, and P for your perception of actual performance.ItemIdeal109765431WorstInformationAccessibleNon-existentAvailabilityof supportPermanentySporadicthereSpeed ofservicePromptЕРSlowE- Expectation (measures of importance)P- Perception of actual performanceIn addition, she included a number of demographic questions relating to the respondent'sposition in the supply chain, role, age, sex and length of time in organisation. These she placedat the end of her questionnaire. Including these questions would allow her to analyse patterns

Focus groups refer to a method of research in which certain participants are asked to respond to…

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Assess the pros and cons of Sam’s decision to use focus groups to generate the list of questions for service quality in place of using standard scale, SERVQUAL.

Understanding Business

12th Edition

ISBN:9781259929434

Author:William Nickels

Publisher:William Nickels

Chapter1: Taking Risks And Making Profits Within The Dynamic Business Environment

Section: Chapter Questions

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