The purpose of this study was to develop a tool that measures the quality of nursing service, to measure the quality of nursing service perceived by consumers, and to identify the gaps between ideal and actual nursing services.

A questionnaire was developed and distributed to 300 people who had been hospitalized in one of six general hospitals with quality of nursing services in five provincial cities in Korea. For data analysis, the SPSS/WIN(ver 10.0) program was used.

The 20 attributes included in the instrument of quality of nursing service is abstracted into 2 factors : tangibility and intangibility. In quality analysis, 15 of 20 attributes are minus scores, meaning that those nursing services are perceived as generally low. However among the minus scores' attributes, only two attributes are significant statistically. Gaps between importance and performance of the nursing service exists in 19 among 20 attributes.

Nursing service quality (performance-expectation) needs to be improved, and Gaps (importance-performance) reduced. In addition, a tool measuring nursing service quality has to be developed so nurses can deal successfully with the quality and gaps of nursing service perceived by consumers.