The development and validation of the Concise Outpatient Department User Satisfaction Scale

Abstract

Objective: To develop and validate a concise scale for measuring outpatient satisfaction suitable across specialties and cultures.

Design: &

Setting: Item generation adopted a concept-driven approach, and 10 candidate items were administered together with a battery of validation items and scales in a cross-sectional survey at a government-aided Chinese medicine specialized outpatient department in Hong Kong.

Participants: About 344 consenting patients or their accompanying caregivers were recruited upon their first visit at the clinic and interviewed one month thereafter.

Results: The overall response rate was 79%. After deleting one item (physician's manner and attitude) for its redundancy suggested by interitem correlations, exploratory factor analysis yielded two factors, General Service and Case Physician, explaining 75% of variance of the remaining nine items. The internal consistency coefficients of the whole scale and the two subscales were higher than 0.90. Criterion-related validity was supported by high correlations with three anchor items, overall satisfaction, intended future reutilization, and recommendation to others (r = 0.38-0.85). Significant correlations with compliance and negative affects provided preliminary evidence for construct validity.

Conclusion: The psychometric properties of the resulting 9-item scale supported its usefulness in measuring outpatient satisfaction. Further validation studies in various specialties and countries are suggested to make future cross-cultural comparisons possible.