• Qual Saf Health Care · Dec 2007

    Capturing users' experience of UK out-of-hours primary medical care: piloting and psychometric properties of the Out-of-hours Patient Questionnaire.

    • J L Campbell, A Dickens, S H Richards, P Pound, M Greco, and P Bower.
    • General Practice and Primary Care, Peninsula Medical School, St Luke's Campus, Smeall Building, Magdalen Road, Exeter EX1 2LU, UK. john.campbell@pms.ac.uk
    • Qual Saf Health Care. 2007 Dec 1;16(6):462-8.

    Background And ObjectiveProvision of out-of-hours care in the UK National Health Service (NHS) has changed in recent years with new models of provision and the introduction of national quality requirements. Existing survey instruments tend to focus on users' satisfaction with service provision; most were developed without undertaking supporting qualitative fieldwork. In this study, a survey instrument was developed taking account of these changes in service provision and undertaking supporting qualitative fieldwork. This paper reports on the development and psychometric properties of the new survey instrument, the Out-of-hours Patient Questionnaire (OPQ), which aims to capture information on the entirety of users' experiences of out-of-hours care, from the decision to make contact through to completion of their care management.MethodsAn iterative approach was undertaken to develop the new instrument which was then tested in users of out-of-hours services in three geographically distributed UK settings. For the purposes of this study, "service users" were defined as "individuals about whom contact was made with an out-of-hours primary care medical service", whether that contact was made by the user themselves, or via a third party. Analysis was undertaken of the acceptability, reliability and validity of the survey instrument.ResultsThe OPQ tested is a 56-item questionnaire, which was distributed to 1250 service users. Respondents were similar in respect of gender, but were older and more affluent (using a proxy measure) than non-respondents. Item completion rates were acceptable. Respondents sometimes completed sections of the questionnaire which did not equate to their principal mode of management as recorded in the record of the contact. Preliminary evidence suggests the OPQ is a valid and reliable instrument which contains within it two discrete scales--a consultation satisfaction scale (nine items) and an "entry-access" scale (four items). Further work is required to determine the generalisability of findings obtained following use of the OPQ, especially to non-white user populations.ConclusionThe OPQ is an acceptable instrument for capturing information on users' experiences of out-of-hours care. Preliminary evidence suggests it is both valid and reliable in use. Further work will report on its utility in informing out-of-hours service planning and configuration and standard-setting in relation to UK national quality requirements.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…

Want more great medical articles?

Keep up to date with a free trial of metajournal, personalized for your practice.
1,624,503 articles already indexed!

We guarantee your privacy. Your email address will not be shared.