Patient Satisfaction Among Combat Veterans Receiving Specialty PTSD Treatment

BACKGROUND: Despite the difficulties with successfully developing effective treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), very little research has been conducted on veterans' perceptions of satisfaction with the treatments they receive through the VA. OBJECTIVE: Our objective was to evaluate combat veterans' satisfaction with Veterans Affairs (VA) services and to evaluate the reliability and preliminary validity of a measure of patient satisfaction, the Charleston Psychiatric Outpatient Satisfaction Scale-VA PTSD Version, which was originally designed for general psychiatric outpatients. METHOD: Fifty-one combat veterans currently receiving specialty mental health care at a VA outpatient PTSD clinic were asked to complete two instruments designed to assess their satisfaction with services provided within the VA mental health and primary care clinics. RESULTS: Data show that the reliability (alpha = 0.96 and 0.95) and validity of these two measures of patient satisfaction were good and indicate that veterans receiving specialty mental health care for PTSD rate their mental health and primary care quite positively. CONCLUSIONS: These results provide preliminary support for the internal reliability and convergent validity of a novel measure of patient satisfaction for use with combat veterans suffering from PTSD and treated within a VA hospital specialty mental health clinic; the results also support the satisfaction of these patients with mental health and primary care services received through the VA.