[Construction and validation of an instrument to assess primary care level patient satisfaction].

Objective: To develop an instrument to assess the satisfaction of patients using health services at the first care level of the city of Mexico (SSA), adapted to the socio-cultural characteristics of the population, and to examine its reliability and validity.

Methods: The instrument reagents were designed using the natural semantic networks technique. The dimensions used have been determined from the literature. Participants included 230 adults with type 2 diabetes attending eight SSA health centers. Subsequently, intelligibility was determined by conducting a pilot, then the construct validity of the instrument by means of exploratory factor analysis was evaluated and its internal consistency was determined by calculating Cronbach's alpha.

Results: The questionnaire is composed of six factors with a Likert-type scale. Its consistency showed a Crombach´s alpha of 0.94. The factor structure included 29 reagents that correlated with the six dimensions with factorial loads>0.581 that explained 66.8% of the total variance.

Conclusions: The patient satisfaction questionnaire incorporates the sociocultural characteristics of the target population and has an adequate level of validity and reliability and is quick and easy in application.