In the field of health care, it was not until a decade ago that the consumer's viewpoint started to be given attention in the form of patient satisfaction studies. One criterion for assessing whether any service system is benefiting its recipients is simply the recipients' perceptions of whether or not their needs are being met. Thus, despite the public's lack of technical expertise in health care, patient perceptions are also an important factor in health care quality assessment. A model of the health care consumption process was used to conceptualize perceived quality as the consumer's evaluation of the quality of the health care service during the consumption stage. "Perceived quality" is conceptualized as being the result of a comparison of actual service received with the consumer's expectations, and is defined as a value judgment by the consumer of explicit aspects of the health care service. Consumers of health care base their evaluations of health care service quality on a number of attributes. This study was exploratory and investigated the composition and structure of the construct of "perceived quality." The findings of this study will prove useful to public policy makers and health care providers, in addition to academics in the disciplines of marketing and medical sociologyMarketin
