A Study on the Image for the Marketing of Nursing Services

간호 서비스의 마케팅을 위한 이미지 연구

Health care marketing can be defined as a process of developing, promoting and administering health care services for the benefits of hospitals as well as consumers. Researchers have reported that one of the significant attributes in the selection of hospital is a client's perceived image of the hospitals. Especially the image of nursing services was one of the important factors of the hospital image. The main purposes of the study were 1) to define the positioning about 5 hospitals' image of nursing services. 2) to define the effects of image attributes to the iamage of hospital nursing services. Eighteen hundred questionnaires were distributed to the parents of middle schools and high schools in Seoul. Among them, 1340 cases were returned but 849 cases were turned out to be useful data and used in final analysis. In data analysis, $SPSS\;/PC^+$ and PC-MDS programs were used for descriptive statistics, multiple regression, and drawing perceptual maps. The image of hospital nursing services was measured developed by the author through literature review and content validation. Reliability coefficients was found to be statistically appropriate level of confidence(Cronbach's Alpha=.8617). The results were as follows : 3) The perceptual map shows that hospital A, B and C,D,E were divided into five groups(See Fig. 1). That is, hospital A, and B are located in a close position and hopital C & E are located at opposite position between X-axis, Hospital D was located in the middle area of the hospital C and:E. In conclusion, this research visiblely depicted perceptual maps using MDS of the consumer's image about hospital nursing services. Since hopital nursing services were differentiated by the image attributes in consumer's perception, the results of the study can help hospital managers plan marketing strategy according to their strong points or weak points. Because the necessity of marketing in recent health care was importantly recognized, this research which is adopting posititioning concept will contribute to the consumers and hospital organizations.