PATIENT SATISFACTION AS A MEDIATOR BETWEEN INTERACTION QUALITY OF SERVICE DELIVERY AND PATIENT LOYALTY IN MILITARY HOSPITALS

Abstract

Military hospitals are unique and different from public and private hospitals where they have been established to safeguard national security and defense. They offer the best physiological and psychological health treatments for special user groups, namely army families, defense personnel, veteran armies, and non-army patients who have critical health problems that need special treatments. Surprisingly, some findings of the present military health management studies circulated in the 21st century reveal that the ability of health personnel to implement interaction quality in delivering health services will strongly invoke patient satisfaction. As a result, this satisfaction may lead to higher patient loyalty. Even though this relationship has extensively been researched, the mediating effect of patient satisfaction is not thoroughly discussed in the military health literature. Thus, this study attempts to evaluate the link between interaction quality of service delivery, patient satisfaction, and patient loyalty. Self-administered questionnaires were collected from patients at military hospitals in West Malaysia. The SmartPLS is utilized to assess the quality of the study instrument and test the research hypotheses. The outcomes of structural equation modeling revealed that patient satisfaction has mediated the relationship between interaction quality of service delivery and patient loyalty. This result may be utilized as important recommendations by practitioners to understand different paradigms of interaction quality of service delivery and plan a social-based health quality management to maintain and achieve the organizational strategy and goals in a time of global competition. In terms of novelty, the current study is the only study in Malaysia thus far that examines the mediating role of patients' satisfaction between interaction quality and patient loyalty in the context of a military hospital.