The General Practitioner Experiences Questionnaire (GPEQ): validity and reliability following the inclusion of new...

The General Practitioner Experiences Questionnaire (GPEQ) measures community mental health centres from the perspective of GP but lacked accessibility scales and documentation of centre level reliability.

To assess the psychometric properties of the GPEQ following the inclusion of four new accessibility items and estimate centre level reliability for all scales and items.

The design of the study is cross-sectional national survey. The setting of the study is postal survey of GPs in Norway evaluating 80 community mental health centres in the four health regions in Norway during autumn of 2008. Three thousand nine hundred and forty-two GPs were sent a postal questionnaire with the GPEQ and were asked to assess their community mental health centre responsible for general adult psychiatric services.

Two thousand two hundred and nine (56.0%) GPs returned a completed questionnaire. Psychometric testing including factor analysis and internal consistency reliability identified seven scales with satisfactory reliability and validity: accessibility (two items, new scale), competence (four items), discharge letter (three items), emergency situations (two items), guidance (three items), referrals (three items, new scale) and workforce situation (four items). All scales met the criterion of 0.7 for Cronbach's alpha. The centre level reliability was >0.8 for all scales, while all items met the criterion of 0.7.

The inclusion of new accessibility items resulted in two new scales in addition to the original five scales in the GPEQ, serving to improve the content validity of the instrument. Centre level reliability was high for all scales and items, giving further support to use GPEQ scores as quality indicators.