Qualidade em serviços de saúde complementar prestados pela aeronáutica e seus conveniados

Abstract

Health, defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, is essential and involves social, economic, and environmental dimensions. Quality in healthcare services is crucial, as it directly influences user experience and loyalty to the service. In contemporary marketing, quality is seen as the ability to meet or exceed customer expectations, a concept further developed by Zeithaml and Parasuraman, who define service quality as the effectiveness in meeting user expectations. To measure this quality, Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry developed the SERVQUAL scale in 1988, which evaluates five dimensions: tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, security, and empathy. This scale measures the gap between customer expectations and perceptions and is widely used in complementary health. Its application allows you to identify points for improvement, analyzing the user experience in detail and offering support for managers to manage the quality of services provided. The general objective of this study was to evaluate the application of the SERVQUAL scale in measuring the quality of complementary health services offered by the Air Force and its partners to DTCEA-FI users. Specific objectives include validating the SERVQUAL scale for the complementary health context, measuring the quality of services offered and evaluating the dimensionality of the scale. This study proved the effectiveness of the SERVQUAL scale to assess the perceived quality of complementary health services, using the three-column model. Despite challenges in data collection, the methodology successfully captured user perceptions. The averages of the evaluated items exceeded five points on a scale of nine, establishing a moderate level of demand. This result is relevant, considering that DTCEA-FI went through a period of interruption in contracts with partners, providing services only at headquarters and removing patients in serious cases. The averages for the ideal desired level on the SERVQUAL scale approached eight, indicating high user expectations, although with significant dispersion due to the high standard deviation. The results show that the institution's performance is within the tolerance zone in almost all factors, with some indicators close to the ideal level, reflecting excellent perceived performance. No significant differences were identified between the evaluations of active and inactive users, aiming for uniformity in the perception of service quality. However, a factor analysis revealed that an original five-dimensional scale was not confirmed, identifying only two factors grouping the evaluated items. Despite this, SERVQUAL demonstrated effectiveness as an instrument to measure the perceived quality of complementary healthcare, highlighting areas for improvement and bringing contributions to the management of the sector. The work is structured into eight chapters, covering everything from the introduction and health concepts to the application of confirmatory factor analysis and the conclusions of the study.