Development and validation of a patient satisfaction questionnaire for outpatients attending health centres in North Indian cities

OBJECTIVES: With the mandate of the Indian Government to improve health services for the population, improving patients' satisfaction with outpatient department (OPD) services is vital. Many scales developed in Western societies to assess patient satisfaction may not be appropriate to the Indian health care system. The aim of this study was to develop and conduct initial psychometric testing of a satisfaction questionnaire for patients attending OPDs in North India. METHODS: The North India Outpatient Department Satisfaction Scale (NIOPDSS) was initially constructed based on a Delphi consensus among experts. After pretesting on a small number of patients, a cross-sectional survey was conducted among 942 outpatients in Chandigarh, North India. The psychometric properties of the questionnaire in terms of content validity, construct validity, convergent and discriminant validity, and reliability were assessed. RESULTS: Eighty items were generated from the Delphi exercise. After assessing the content validity, data quality and construct validity of the questionnaire, a final instrument with 17 items representing six dimensions of patient satisfaction was developed. The internal consistency ranged from 0.72 to 0.93 and intra-class correlation coefficient ranged from 0.52 to 0.80. CONCLUSION: NIOPDSS appears to be a reliable and valid measure of patient satisfaction for patients attending OPDs in North India. Further research should be carried out with different outpatient populations to assess the wider performance of the questionnaire.