Ulrich Schmitz 
Challenges of measuring dental service quality 

Academic Paper from the year 2018 in the subject Medicine – Dentistry, grade: 82, Manchester Metropolitan University Business School, language: English, abstract: This report presents different methods for measuring the service quality in dental health offices. The aim of this report is to show typical difficulties in measuring service quality in healthcare services and to discuss potential approaches offered by science to meet these challenges. The area of ‚General Dentistry‘ is chosen as an example for the complexity of services.

The first part of this report gives an overview about the terms service, quality and service quality. The second part looks at different challenges in measuring the quality from two sides: from the perspective of the service provider, the dentist and the team, as well as from the perspective of the service recipient, the patient and the healthcare insurance company. The third part contains a discussion of methods to measure quality, paying special attention to SERVQUAL.