[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.