Determining quality of public health care services in rural India

Purpose – This paper aims to measure the perception of patients towards quality of services in public health care centres in rural India.Design/methodology/approach – A 23‐item scale that tested well for reliability and construct validity was employed for the study. Mixed sampling technique was employed to select the sample. A total of 500 respondents from Eastern, Western and Central regions of Uttar Pradesh were surveyed.Findings – The survey instrument had an overall Cronbach's alpha value of 0.96 and was able to discern differences across various socio‐demographic characteristics of the respondents. The opinions of the respondents towards health care quality were not very favourable. Negative scores were obtained on items, “availability of adequate medical equipments” and “availability of doctors for women”. Education, gender and income were found to be significantly associated with user perception.Research limitations/implications – The current study was limited to measuring the perceived quality of ...