A questionnaire for measuring patient satisfaction to general anesthesia

Measurement of patient satisfaction to general anesthesia needs a valid and reliable tool to cover all dimensions of satisfaction. However, there is no standard tool in a Thai version for measurement of this satisfaction. The objective of this study was to develop a valid and reliable tool for measurement of patient satisfaction to general anesthesia.

Review of the medical literature and patients' interviews were performed to generate the ideas and dimensions of satisfaction. Items were generated according to customer satisfaction. The pilot questionnaire was set and verified for content validity by item correlation. One item of low item correlation was deleted. The pilot study was performed by application of the pilot questionnaire to patients to detect problems on processes to derive responses and problems of the questionnaire. Another two items were excluded due to high missing responses. The results of reliability analysis were satisfactory. Revision of the pilot questionnaire was taken eventually into the final questionnaire. Then, the final questionnaire was processed to obtain Cronbach's alpha coefficient at King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital. Finally, retest for reliability was taken at Police General Hospital in order to prove its generalization.

The constructed final questionnaire composed of ten items. All item correlations were higher than 0.5. Cronbach's alpha coefficients obtained in King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital and Police General Hospital were 0.8775 and 0.7571, respectively.

The developed questionnaire was qualified for both validity and reliability. Also verified for the wide application in another hospital.