Section B: Case Study on Public Relations Practitioners Practices and Styles

During his degree placement Mr. Badrul spent a year working in the Purchasing Services department of a local acute hospital "ABC" trust. During her time in the ABC hospital, she saw at first hand the pressures faced by the organisation as it strove to deliver the vision of The ABC hospital Plan (ABC plan 2000), of a health service that provided timely, high-quality, value-for-money and patient-centred care. Specifically, she witnessed the changes being introduced in relation to supply chain policy and practice as the Purchasing Services department responded to the challenge of delivering quality products and services that met the needs of the end patient and other service users. Embarking on his research project Mr. Badrul decided to focus on the topic of measuring service quality in health care supply chains. During the placement the Head of Purchasing Services had expressed an interest in the topic as being both important and timely and had offered to assist in facilitating the collecting of data. In addition, an initial review of the literature suggested that there was scope to make a worthwhile contribution to knowledge by researching the topic. Having completed a review of the literature on supply chain management and service quality, Mr. Badrul established an overarching aim of his research project, which was to measure and compare perceptions of service quality in health care supply chains. Through his reading of the literature and having undertaken some initial exploratory interviews with Purchasing Services' staff she had developed the following objectives for the research: To establish how service quality is measured in health care supply chains To investigate the factors that influence perceptions of service quality of different people/groups within health care supply chain chains A major issue facing Sam was deciding upon a unit of analysis. To do this she needed to understand how the supply chains worked. Therefore, she chose to investigate three services managed by the ABC hospital in which she had worked during his placement: personnel, transport and medical equipment. For each service she identified a supply chain comprising of four groups: primary care trust (patients and general practitioners), Strategic Health Authority, the acute hospital ABC hospital, and a supplier to the hospital. To meet the research's first objective of establishing how service quality is measured Mr. Badrul considered undertaking a survey using a previously validated items/manifest variables/statements, such as SERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al., 1985). This presented Mr. Badrul with a dilemma. Whilst there were clear benefits in terms of establishing external validity, with such instruments having been shown through prior research to contain measures of service quality that are appropriate to a wide range of situations, other literature suggested that such generic instruments may not provide sufficient detail of the measures important in the health care context (for example: Robinson, 1999). Judging that the limitations of using a previously validated instrument outweighed the benefits, Mr. Badrul decided to undertake focus group meetings with each of the four groups in each of the three supply chains (twelve meetings in total), to obtain data about the attributes used to measure service quality. After the focus group session Mr. Badrul managed to generate a set of items that were included in the questionnaire for the pilot test. Mr. Badul pilot tested his questionnaire on a sample of five people drawn from the focus groups. Some minor amendments were made based on the feedback from this pilot. Having designed and piloted the questionnaire Mr. Badrul planned to mail it out via email to 1500 people: 500 per supply chain comprising of 125 representatives for the four groups in each chain. Similar survey-based research in supply chains had reported response rates of about 20% (Larson and Poist, 2004) and, on this basis, Sam anticipated obtaining a dataset of about 300 completed questionnaires: 100 per supply chain. Questions: a) What are the strengths and weaknesses of Mr. Badrul's decision to use focus groups to generate a list of service quality measures rather than relying on a pre-validated instrument such as SERVQUAL?