Service quality in the Irish health service

While service quality has received considerable attention over the past decade, there is a relative dearth of research into service initiatives in the public sector. Similarly, relatively little attention has been given to the service quality of professional services. This paper looks at a service initiative in the public health sector. Particular attention is paid to the service quality of medical professionals. We argue that the historical and environmental contexts within which quality initiatives operate differ fundamentally between commercial and public sector organizations. We illustrate this by looking at a quality initiative in the Irish health sector. A series of in-depth interviews provide the basis for a discussion of the antecedents of service quality initiatives in the health sector in the 1990s. We also chart the emergence of a managerial quality model which we present in the context of power relations between medical professionals and hospital managers.