Development and validation of an in-patient satisfaction questionnaire.

OBJECTIVE: To develop a psychometrically sound, hospital patient satisfaction questionnaire to be administered to patients discharged from medical and surgical services. DESIGN: Cross-sectional survey in Spanish. SETTING: Four acute care general hospitals of the Basque Health Service. STUDY PARTICIPANTS: Random samples of 650 discharged patients from each hospital during February and March 2002. A total of 1910 patients responded to the questionnaire (73.5%). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Overall perceived quality of health care and perceived health improvement. RESULTS: No sociodemographic differences were found between respondents and non-respondents. Six dimensions were identified from the factor analysis, explaining 50% of the variance. All items, except two, revealed loadings above 0.4. Cronbach's alpha exceeded 0.7 for all dimensions, except privacy. Comfort was the dimension with the lowest level of patient satisfaction, whereas privacy was the most satisfactory. The interscale correlations never exceeded the internal consistency of each scale. The analysis of the dimensions with two items of global assessment showed a positive correlation. CONCLUSIONS: The results obtained from the development and validation of the questionnaire provide evidence of its psychometric properties, although it would be useful to carry out further analyses to assess time-based properties of reliability. We found a positive relation between the degree of patient satisfaction and overall evaluation of the quality of health care, providing evidence of the ability of the questionnaire to correlate with other concepts. The in-patient satisfaction questionnaire could become a useful instrument in quality-of-care assessment.