An Empirical Analysis on the Relationships Between Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction in the Malaysian Healthcare Services

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between service quality （SQ） and customer satisfaction （CS） in the Malaysian healthcare system. The study is significant due to the environmental pressures such as the demographic changes, the aging of populations, the emergence of new treatments and technologies, and the increased insistence on grater quality of service. A service satisfaction survey was conducted among visitors （either patients or their relatives and friends） that visited hospitals （both public and private） in 10 regions in Malaysia. A total of 1,000 questionnaires were distributed purposively to these visitors, of which 925 questionnaires were returned for further analysis, yielding a response rate of 92.5 percent. The study found that among the eight dimensions of SQ tested, safety measures were not at all significantly related to CS as compared with the other seven dimensions. On a detailed note, the quality satisfaction of customers is very much influenced by infrastructure （0.121）, clinical care （0.601）, and trustworthiness of the hospitals （0.139）. Also as noted, the time satisfaction of customers is influenced by personnel quality （0.102）, administrative procedures （0.562）, and trustworthiness of the hospitals （0.168）. Whilst the cost satisfaction of customers is influenced by administrative procedure （0.101）, corporate image （0.130）, social responsibility （0.315）, and trustworthiness of the hospitals （0.261）. On overall, the findings of this study suggest that trustworthiness and administrative procedures are the two most important factors that influence satisfaction of customers that the Malaysian healthcare industry should take a good care of.

The Aviation Technology Two-Sided Matching with the Expected Time Based on the Probabilistic Linguistic Preference Relations

The two-sided matching has been widely applied to the decision-making problems in the field of management.With the limited working experience,the two-sided agents usually cannot provide the preference order directly for the opposite agent,but rather to provide the preference relations in the form of linguistic information.The preference relations based on probabilistic linguistic term sets(PLTSs)not only allowagents to provide the evaluation with multiple linguistic terms,but also present the different preference degrees for linguistic terms.Considering the diversities of the agents,they may provide their preference relations in the form of the probabilistic linguistic preference relation(PLPR)or the probabilistic linguistic multiplicative preference relation(PLMPR).For two-sided matching with the expected time,we first provide the concept of the time satisfaction degree(TSD).Then,we transform the preference relations in different forms into the unified preference relations(u-PRs).The consistency index to measure the consistency of u-PRs is introduced.Besides,the acceptable consistent u-PRs are constructed,and an algorithm is proposed to modify the unacceptable consistent u-PRs.Furthermore,we present the whole two-sided matching decisionmaking process with the acceptable consistent u-PRs.Finally,a case about aviation technology suppliers and demanders matching is presented to exhibit the rationality and practicality of the proposed method.Some analyses and discussions are provided to further demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.