[Design and validation of a questionnaire of the hospital outpatient clinics in Madrid, Spain, 2006].

Background: In order to improve the quality of health care it is necessary to know the point of view of the patients through satisfaction surveys. Satisfaction surveys need some psychometric properties to guarantee its reliability and validity. The aim of this paper is to design and to validate a questionnaire to determine the satisfaction of patients of the hospital outpatient clinics.

Methods: Validation of a satisfaction questionnaire, designed by an expert group and composed for 12 questions. The questionnaire was given to a sample of 677 patients attended in the hospital Gregorio Marañón outpatient clinics. The psychometric properties of the questionnaire were established: construct validity, concurrent criterion validity, predictive capacity and internal consistency.

Results: Two dimensions were identified in the construct validity analyses, explaining 63% of the variance: "clinical quality" and "administrative quality". The concurrent validity analysis showed a Spearman's rank correlation coefficient of 0.85 related to the standard criterion "global satisfaction with the attention provided in outpatient clinics" and an OR of 1.19 related to the criterion "do you know the name of the physician who attended you?" The predictive capacity of the questionnaire was measured by discriminated analysis, obtaining 84% of correct classified, and the internal consistency test gave a Cronbach's alpha of 0.90.

Conclusions: Our questionnaire has enough psychometric properties to be considered an useful and feasible tool to measure the satisfaction of patients of the hospital outpatient clinics.