[Personalizing the reference level: gold standard to evaluate the quality of service perceived]

Abstract

Objective: To know the cutoff point at which in-house Nuclear Medicine Department (MND) customers consider that the quality of service is good (personalized cutoff).

Material and method: We conducted a survey of the professionals who had requested at least 5 tests to the Nuclear Medicine Department. A total of 71 doctors responded (response rate: 30%). A question was added to the questionnaire for the user to establish a cutoff point for which they would consider the quality of service as good. The quality non-conformities, areas of improvement and strong points of the six questions measuring the quality of service (Likert scale 0 to 10) were compared with two different thresholds: personalized cutoff and one proposed by the service itself a priori. Test statistics: binomial and Student's t-test for paired data.

Results: A cutoff value of 7 was proposed by the service as a reference while 68.1% of respondents suggested a cutoff above 7 points (mean 7.9 points). The 6 elements of perceived quality were considered strong points with the cutoff proposed by the MND, while there were 3 detected with the personalized threshold. Thirteen percent of the answers were nonconformities with the service cutoff versus 19.2% with the personalized one, the differences being statistically significant (difference 95% CI 6.44%:0,83-12.06).

Conclusions: The final image of the perceived quality of an in-house customer is different when using the cutoff established by the Department versus the personalized cutoff given by the respondent.

Keywords: Calidad percibida; Encuestas; Gold standard; Patrón oro; Punto de corte; Service quality; Survey; Threshold.