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Top1. Introduction
After the breakdown of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Central Asia started reforms in-hospital services. There are more than 3250 dental hospitals in Central Asia and about 95% of dental hospitals are privately owned. The best-equipped and largest dental hospitals are situated in Almaty and Astana. They include the government-owned republican facilities and privately owned hospitals. Main oil and gas companies have inhouse dental hospitals. All of these corporate hospitals offer a full array of dental services and have fairly sophisticated modern equipment. To enforce the quality standard, Kazakhstan's government needs that all dental products imported into the country are registered with the ministry of health. The registration is valid for a period of 3 to 5 years and depends on the type of product or equipment. Re-registration is necessary after the expiry date, depending on the status of the product or equipment. The Soviet model of health care offers complete access to basic health care. Hospital management is not adequate as the healthcare staff work under difficult conditions. The quality of care suffers and the patients are dissatisfied. The physicians lack the necessary support in addition to shortages of equipment and drugs. The cost of dental care is high.
Two systems of quality are appropriate for health services in a hospital. They are defined as functional quality and technical quality (Gronroos 1984). Technical quality is defined baes on the methodological accuracy of method and diagnosis. The technical aspects of healthcare quality service confines with the administrators and health care professionals (Bopp 1990). The functional quality is the style of service that is provided to the patient. Usually, patients are not in a position to judge the technical quality of the service. The functional quality is judged by the patient (Donabedian 1989). The functional quality is the dominant factor that impacts the patients’ value perceptions. It affects the patients’ intent to consume the service (Zeithaml 1988). Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1988) established a SERVQUAL measurement tool for the service industries. SERVQUAL measures the patients' perceptions of the services and compares it with the ideal expectation the patient has in mind. Berry et al., (1993) consider the quality gap as the difference between customer opinions and customer anticipations. The purpose of the “gap analyzer” is to evaluate service quality (Brooks et al., 1999). Shafiq et al., (2017) designed a scale that determines hospital service quality. They improved the SERVQUAL tool to get the service quality gap. Mohebifar, et al., (2016) measured service quality in hospitals with an importance-performance matrix. They use the SERVQUAL system to compute the negative gap for quality improvement. Service quality in a dental hospital may not be well defined by the patient alone simply taking the patient’s view (Takeuchi and Quelch, 1983). A tool like HOQ (Figure 1) will assist in such an effort. HOQ is managed by cross-functional hospital teams (Lindborg and Henry, 1997). It classifies and answers issues involved in product development, processes, and services, to satisfy its stakeholders. It is difficult to deliver quality service in the absence of a good understanding of what are the patient needs. These patient requirements are the must-do, expected, and excitement characteristics that are to be included in the product-service bundle. The porch on the right side of the house identifies the relative importance of each of these features and presents a competitive assessment of the product-service bundle. Each column under the roof of the house represents a design characteristic that is required to meet one or more of the customer requirements. Performance measurement (Perjons et al., 2005) is important since it helps a hospital to identify defects in services.