Studing on the Home Help Service Quality Gaps in Taipei County Long Term Care Management Center

The most recent long-term care (LTC) policy for elderly in Taiwan is called “Ten-Year Plan for Long-Term Care”. Upon carrying out this new policy, the government is eager to know if the services provided by LTC management centers satisfy the needs of people. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to use gap analysis to identify the differences between the expectations and the perceptions of home help services from the family caregivers in Taipei County LTC management center. The participants consisted of 1300 family caregivers of elderly who uses home help services. A modified version Chinese SERVQUAL questionnaire was used to study family caregivers' perceptions and the expectations of LTC services provided by caregivers and/or care managers. Of the 1300 surveys mailed to main family caregivers, we received 307 (23.6%) completed questionnaires. Our result shows significant differences (p<0.001) between family caregivers' expectations and perceptions of LTC services provided by caregivers on all five dimensions (tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy). Most notably on the reliability of caregivers (perceptions minus expectations is -0.46, p<0.001), in addition to that, family caregivers' expectation is much higher than the perception on the dimension of assurance of care managers. We strongly anticipated that the result of this study will enable informed decisions from the decision makers and help future improvements on related plans.