The development and reliability of the Royal College of General Practitioners' questionnaire for measuring senior house officers' satisfaction with their hospital training.

BACKGROUND

The training provided for senior house officers (SHOs) has been the subject of debate, and variable satisfaction with training has been reported. The reliability of the instruments used for measuring satisfaction has not been adequately addressed.

AIM

To develop a reliable questionnaire to measure SHO satisfaction with hospital training.

METHOD

A 42-item questionnaire with eight scales was developed using criteria from the joint hospital visiting guidelines of the Royal College of General Practitioners. The questionnaire was sent to SHOs in Anglia before monitoring visits from the royal colleges, the postgraduate dean and the Joint Committee on Postgraduate Training for General Practice.

RESULTS

Response rates varied from 37.0% to 100%, with an overall response rate of 58.8%. The internal reliability of the whole questionnaire was 0.82. Levels of internal reliability for the individual scales were satisfactory, Cronbach's alpha coefficient being 0.75 or more in all but two of the scales. Test-retest reliability using Pearson's product moment correlation coefficient was greater than 0.82 for six of the scales. There were significant differences in total satisfaction between SHOs reporting on posts accredited by the different royal colleges and also between SHOs training for general practice and those training to be specialists.

CONCLUSION

A reliable questionnaire has been developed to measure SHO satisfaction with hospital training that is acceptable to doctors and feasible to administer. National acceptance of a single questionnaire for monitoring SHO posts would enable standards to be monitored regularly at a time of considerable change in hospital training.