Service Quality in Rural Healthcare Infrastructures of Jhargram District: An Explorative Insight with Demographic Contours

Abstract

Indian healthcare system is occupied with the Primary health centres which serve its purpose at the ground level. The significance of Primary healthcare system lies with the approbation of serving the rural parts of India. The rural parts of India are also characterized by the hilly areas, marginalised as well as tribal sections of society. Though the primary healthcare outcome status has improved with change in output indices like life expectancy, infant mortality rate, estimated maternal mortality rate, but still it is faced with circumstantial and quintessential challenges. In light of these ground conditions, it is very indispensable to screen out the availability of the service quality available in the primary healthcare centres. This research is an expedient approach designed pragmatically to measure the perception of the patients towards the service quality delivered from the PHC’s. The service availability has been assessed with the relation of demographic categorization. The results obtained have suggested that major service quality dimensions as obtained after data redundancy are personnel quality and safety measures with lower mean and scores, infrastructure, clinical care, administrative procedures with higher mean scores. While accessing the relation with the demographic categorization, positive association of service quality dimensions have been obtained with age, educational qualification and with no significant association with gender. From the view of managerial implications, this study will help in fostering the rural healthcare infrastructure by reengineering the existing facilities through integration of findings obtained. The study will help in amalgamating the operations of the primary healthcare centres with a pre-eminent and resilient foundation.