The assessment of quality of care in the Indian healthcare industry: the employees’ and patients’ perspectives

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to capture patients' and employees' perception of quality of care in the Indian private hospitals and to find the possible perceptual gaps between both the groups.Design/methodology/approachAuthors have referred to the Victorian patient satisfaction monitoring (VPSM) scale and studied the responses of 327 patients and 327 employees collected from six private Indian tertiary care hospitals. SPSS v26 software was used to conduct the data reliability test, descriptive analysis and Mann–Whitney U test.FindingsAuthors have found significant differences in perceptions of quality of care between the patients and employees in the Indian hospitals. Employees have high positive perceptions towards the provided medical care whereas the patients have less favourable perceptions for many quality indicators.Practical implicationsThis study findings help the healthcare managers, practitioners and healthcare workers of the Indian hospitals to understand the perceptions of both the employees and the patients towards healthcare quality elements and help to reduce the existing perceptual gap in the process of providing quality healthcare services.Originality/valueTo the best of authors knowledge, this is one of the pioneering studies conducted in Indian healthcare industry to capture and compare the perceptions of both the employees' and the patients' perceptions of various quality of care elements. This study highlighted the existing perceptual gap between the employees and the patients on various healthcare quality elements and indicated the critical areas for improvement to provide high quality healthcare services.