An Empirical Study to Determine the Significant Predictors of Trust in Government Hospitals

Out-of-pocket expenditure (OOP) on healthcare forms a major barrier to health seeking in India. The per capita public health spending is low in India, being among the five lowest in the world. Yet, India ranks among the top 20 of the world’s countries in its private spending. A large part of our population continues to depend on private sector for their healthcare needs even when many of them cannot afford it. Private spending on healthcare pushes millions of vulnerable households into poverty every year. The affected households find it impossible to get out of this vicious cycle of poor health and poverty. This results in huge losses to the country in terms of human resource as it affects the productivity of the population and consequently affects the GDP of the country. Patients’ trust in their healthcare providers is necessary for them to accept therapy, to reveal information, and to describe feelings, all prerequisites for effective medical care. Trust in government hospitals in India is an area which is under-researched. The efforts to improve service quality of public hospitals can only produce tangible results in reducing the burden of people of India if it causes a significant change in the intangible construct of trust in public hospitals. Measuring service quality of government hospitals and linking it to trust in government hospitals is an important step to understand where the hospitals are faltering and what aspects of service quality are significant predictors of trust in government hospitals. The purpose of this paper is to find significant predictors of trust in government hospitals from measures of perceived service quality by using multiple regression analyses. It was found that social responsibility, medical service and discharge process in government hospitals are significant predictors of trust in government hospitals.