Service quality and user satisfaction of outsourced facilities management (FM) services in Nigeria’s public hospitals

The purpose of this paper is to explore the concepts of satisfaction and service quality of outsourced facilities management (FM) services.

An empirical survey of 208 stakeholders in Nigeria’s hospitals was used to first, assess the level of satisfaction of users of outsourced FM services and second, validate a conceptual model using the structural equation modelling (SEM) methodology.

Findings show that the three top services are cleaning (6.17), security (6.01) and landscape maintenance (5.73) while the least rated service is the plant maintenance and their personnel. The result also indicates that all six hypotheses were supported by the service quality satisfaction model structural equation model, meaning that quality attributes depicted by the outsourced FM services is antecedent to overall satisfaction. Specifically, “security services to overall satisfaction” received the highest path loading of 0.88, and was closely followed by “cleaning services to overall satisfaction” with a loading of 0.82. “Plant maintenance services to overall satisfaction” was however supported even though it had a very low path coefficient of 0.38.

The study establishes a causal relationship between antecedents of satisfaction and service quality within the context of Nigeria’s public hospitals and provided insight into outsourced services that received high level of satisfaction among stakeholders unique from previous studies.