The development and validation of the concise outpatient department user satisfaction scale

Objectives. 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.