Elucidating the importance parameters in assessing performance and designing questionnaire on hospital food service / Noor Suzana Osman

In the delivery of high-quality services, healthcare organisations have become valuedriven, placing equal emphasis on cost containment and quality in the food service industry. Healthcare administrators regard quality as a distinguishable, quantifiable, and amendable topic of concern. Performance improvement is important for food service organisations to increase their potential of achieving the required results and more effectively meeting the needs of customers, patients, and other service users. This research aimed to investigate the factors that impacted the quality of hospital food service and to construct a reliable and valid instrument for assessing the operations of hospital food services in Malaysia. The content and face validity of the questionnaire were determined through a process that included a literature review, semi-structure interviews with food service staffs, experts' judgement, and target user testing. The questionnaire was distributed to food service staffs in teaching, private, and government hospitals nationwide to ascertain its construct validity. The number of factors was ascertained, and determinations concerning the retention or rejection of particular items were made utilising exploratory factor analysis. Cronbach's alpha and composite reliability (CR) were employed to assess the scale's reliability. Convergent validity was evaluated using the average variance extracted (AVE) value. A total of 160 respondents participated in the survey; of these, catering officers, or assistant catering officers (59.4%) employed in a government hospital (63.1%) constituted the majority. The exploratory factor analysis confirmed the construct validity of three out of the initial five subscales. Three sub-scales comprised the remaining seventeen items (factor loadings greater than 0.50 for all item) of the questionnaire: operational management, food production and distribution management, and patient/customer service management. AVE values were greater than 0.50, Cronbach's alpha values were greater than 0.70, and CR values were greater than 0.80 for each subscale. This recently designed, user-friendly survey instrument exhibited robust construct validity and satisfactory reliability in this limited sample. The tool offered a potentially valuable instrument for staff-based evaluation of the quality of hospital food service operations and identification of areas requiring enhancement.