Services marketing: the personnel management connection.

Quality of care is an espoused yet in some ways elusive objective in the provision of health services. In this paper, a marketing framework is utilized to outline the characteristics of services which create difficulties for quality assurance and to examine service quality as perceived by the consumer. Two key concepts are explored: interactive marketing, the management of the production-consumption process, and internal marketing, the consideration of employees as an internal client group. The view is advanced that attention to these concepts highlights the importance of personnel management functions in ensuring quality in the provision of health services.