Development of a French inpatient satisfaction questionnaire

Area of Science:

• Health Services Research
• Psychometrics
• Patient Experience Measurement

Background:

• Measuring patient satisfaction is crucial for healthcare quality improvement.
• Existing instruments may not be suitable for all contexts, necessitating development of new tools.
• The disconfirmation paradigm offers a framework for understanding patient expectations and satisfaction.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a brief, generic, self-administered questionnaire in French to assess inpatient satisfaction.
• To create a reliable and valid instrument for measuring patient experiences in a hospital setting.

Main Methods:

• Utilized open-ended questions based on the disconfirmation paradigm to identify key patient issues.
• Generated an initial pool of 93 items, refined to 29 through a rigorous selection process.
• Assessed content validity by comparison with existing instruments, construct validity via hypothesis testing and principal component analysis, and reliability using Cronbach's alpha.

Main Results:

• Achieved a participation rate of 71% and a completion rate of 95%, indicating good acceptability.
• Principal component analysis revealed six scales explaining 58% of the variance in total satisfaction scores.
• Internal consistency reliability estimates ranged from 0.67 to 0.86, demonstrating acceptable reliability.

Conclusions:

• The developed French-language inpatient satisfaction questionnaire shows promising preliminary psychometric properties.
• This instrument can be utilized to gather patient feedback for continuous quality improvement in healthcare settings.