Quality of Services in Substance Abuse Treatment Centers in Shahroud, Iran

Standard cares in Substance Abuse Treatment Centers (SATC) have an important role in treatment success achievement. Patients’ views will provide valuable information to improve the performance of these centers. The purpose of current study was to determine patients’ comments on quality of addiction treatment at SATCs. This cross-sectional study was conducted in 2013. The study population consisted of addicted patients receiving methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) in SATCs of Shahroud. Using stratified sampling method, a total of 250 individuals were randomly selected from the SATCs. The SERVQUAL service quality model was used to measure service quality in five dimensions of tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. Using paired samples t-test the gap between patients’ expectations of a service offering and the patients’ perceptions of the service received was analyzed by 5-dimensional structure of service quality Overall, the score of patients’ expectations of service quality (4.45±0.67) was higher than that of their perceptions (4.24±0.0.76). For the dimensions of tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy, the mean difference between patients’ perceptions and expectations of the quality of addiction treatment services was -0.34, -0.17, -0.19, -0.14, and -0.24 respectively. All differences were statistically significant. Although the mean score of patients’ perceptions was good, the patients were not satisfied with the quality of addiction treatment services in the SATCs at Shahroud. The results showed that there is a gap between the current state and the desired state in terms of service quality in SATCs and this gap can be reduced by proper planning, management and training.