Quality of health care and patient satisfaction in liver disease: the development and preliminary results of the QUOTE-Liver questionnaire.

BACKGROUND: Consensus on how to adequately measure patient satisfaction with health care is limited, and has led to the development of many questionnaires with various methodological problems. The objective of this study was to develop a liver disease- and care-specific patient satisfaction instrument on the basis of previously tested methodology in patient satisfaction measurement, the so called QUOTE- series: Quality Of health care services Through the patients' Eyes. QUOTE methodology aims to standardise the measurement of satisfaction as the discrepancy between patients' needs, and the extent to which these needs are being met.

METHODS: As part of the QUOTE methodology routine, 11 Patients with chronic liver disease from the Erasmus MC (Rotterdam, the Netherlands) participated in focus-group meetings on patient satisfaction with the provided service at the outpatient hepatology clinic. Twenty-eight other patients were invited to rank the items generated during the focus-group meetings according to importance. With this information, the QUOTE-Liver was constructed. Face validity, construct validity, content validity, and reliability of the newly developed questionnaire were assessed in a test sample of 152 patients with chronic liver disease.

RESULTS: Two liver-disease specific, and the 18 items ranked as most important were included in the QUOTE-Liver. Face validity and content validity were acceptable: neither patients (n = 152) nor psychologists (n = 3) or a hepatologist suggested any extra items to be included. Construct validity was good: the overall score correlated significantly with the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) measuring overall satisfaction (r = 0.69, p < 0.01). The reliability of the QUOTE-Liver was excellent (alpha = 0.90).

CONCLUSION: The QUOTE-Liver is an easy to complete instrument based on standardized state-of-the-art satisfaction measurement methodology. Preliminary evidence for its validity and reliability was demonstrated. The QUOTE-liver covers those aspects of satisfaction that CLD patients consider to be important when visiting the outpatient department of hepatology. Even though further substantiating of the favourable psychometric findings is desirable, it seems to be a useful instrument that can be used to identify those aspects of care that need improvement in order to optimise the provision of health care for patients with chronic liver disease.