Managers today, in looking for ways to manage their staff effectively and to increase productivity, too often turn to the latest “management tool” or technique as the panacea to all their manpower problems. Attracted by glossy promises or presentations, these are introduced, generally from...

Purpose – Hospitals procure high volumes of medical supplies through large distributors in order to leverage economies of scale. However, when shortages hit, hospitals incur high penalty costs by purchasing from secondary markets. In this paper, the authors counter the hospital's typical...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to improve the understanding of the mediating role of the extensiveness of strategic planning on the relationship between slack resources and organizational performance. Design/methodology/approach – The study uses empirical data gathered from 102...

Empirically investigates, using a conjoint methodology, the importance weights given the attributes of quality for acute care hospital services. The study shows consumers evaluated the technical dimensions of nursing care, physician care, and outcome as more important than the accommodation...

An experiment was conducted to examine the relationship between patient satisfaction and patients’ freedom to choose a physician and the outcome of a health service encounter. Each construct with corresponding measurements is discussed and their relationship with satisfaction is reviewed....

The purpose of this study is to describe and analyse the quality of a professional surgical service process, and to reveal the main elements that constitute excellence in the experience of the surgical service of a private hospital. First, a theoretical framework for the surgical service process...

Reports in a segmentation study conducted to determine whether consumer‐based variables such as activities, interests and opinions could be used to segment markets based on service quality expectations. Identifies those consumer‐based variables found to be significantly related to service...

Examines the factors that influence consumer dispositions toward hospital advertising. Both perceptual and demographic variables were included in the analysis. The results suggest that when hospital advertisements are perceived as helpful and not adding to patients′ costs, consumers are likely...

Describes the job of selling health‐care services and compares it to traditional types of sales positions. Providing such a comparison may stimulate marketing managers in other service industries to conduct their own survey of salesforce characteristics and to analyze critically the findings....

The diversity of the health care sector makes it difficult to come up with managerially useful generalizations concerning marketing practice in health care organizations. Develops specific categories of health care offerings and proposes a two‐by‐two matrix for classifying health care...