Questionnaire to assess patient satisfaction with pharmaceutical care in Spanish language.

OBJECTIVE

To develop and validate a questionnaire, in Spanish, for assessing patient satisfaction with pharmaceutical care received in community pharmacies.

DESIGN

Selection and translation of questionnaire's items; definition of response scale and demographic questions. Evaluation of face and content validity, feasibility, factor structure, reliability and construct validity.

SETTING

Forty-one community pharmacies of the province of Santa Fe. Argentina.

PARTICIPANTS

Questionnaire administered to patients receiving pharmaceutical care or traditional pharmacy services.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE

Pilot test to assess feasibility. Factor analysis used principal components and varimax rotation. Reliability established using internal consistency with Cronbach's alpha. Construct validity determined with extreme group method.

RESULTS

A self-administered questionnaire with 27 items, 5-point Likert response scale and demographic questions was designed considering multidimensional structure of patient satisfaction. Questionnaire evaluates cumulative experience of patients with comprehensive pharmaceutical care practice in community pharmacies. Two hundred and seventy-four complete questionnaires were obtained. Factor analysis resulted in three factors: Managing therapy, Interpersonal relationship and General satisfaction, with a cumulative variance of 62.51%. Cronbach's alpha for the whole questionnaire was 0.96, and 0.95, 0.88 and 0.76 for the three factors, respectively. Mann-Whitney test for construct validity did not showed significant differences between pharmacies that provide pharmaceutical care and those that do not, however, 23 items showed significant differences between the two groups of pharmacies.

CONCLUSION

The questionnaire developed can be a reliable and valid instrument to assess patient satisfaction with pharmaceutical care in community pharmacies in Spanish. Further research is needed to deepen the validation process.