The purpose of this study is to investigate service quality and future development of volunteer workers in long-term care institutions. Quantitative and qualitative research methods are applied to examine the basic attributes of volunteer workers and residents in long-term care institution, and their perception of volunteer service quality and related factors. Through interview with the person in charge of the
institution, we can better understand the development of volunteer services in long-term care institution for future development.
Referring to SERVQUAL scale, we created a structured questionnaire as a research tool for studying service quality. Cases came from a care center in Central Taiwan with the volunteer workers and residents in the institution as our research subjects. SPSS12.0 software is used for statistically analyzing the data we collected from 68 volunteer workers and 46 institutionalized residents. Research results show there are effects of several variables such as level of education, marriage status, daily life function and hours receiving service on the perception of institutionalized residents. The mean of volunteer service quality perception is 84.67 (with standard deviation of 7.88), the mean for the institutionalized residents is 90.22 (with standard deviation of 6.90). In terms of every aspects of volunteer service quality, both has the same order in score ranking as follows: guarantee, visibility, responsiveness, dependability, empathy; it shows their opinions are consistent and the institutionalized residents are more satisfied with the service quality than the perceived service quality by the volunteer workers. During the interview with institution director, we discovered that the staff is generally inadequate in long-term care institution. Under the pressures of operating a profitable business and promoting life quality of residents, there is fairly high demand for using volunteer service workers. We concluded there are three stages in the process of using volunteer workers according to the job description of volunteer service required in the institution. First, during the initial stage of volunteer work when the staff is inadequate, it is hoped that the volunteer workers can provide direct services such as chatting, feeding, leading the activity for the residents; when the
volunteers have worked a long time and the staff is adequate, it is hoped that the volunteer workers can extend to the indirect services such as environment beautification, safeguard the entrance, give tour of the facility and reception. Finally, we recommend that the institution may need to plan, recruit, train and make good use of volunteer workers according to individual needs so that it can solve the problem of inadequate manpower in the institution, and the life
quality of residents can be improved and eventually they will feel as comfortable as at their own home.
