Development of patient satisfaction questionnaire in allergic rhinitis

Recent suggestions emphasize the importance of assessing medical care outcomes from the point of view of both professional opinion and patient's subject like patient satisfaction as well as quality of life. Self-administered questionnaires are often used as an instrument for this purpose. When compared with quality of life, there is less useful questionnaire for patient satisfaction. Accordingly, we here aimed to develop the questionnaire, which is disease-specific, comprehensive, simple, clinically available and satisfied psychometric validation study. The items were collected from patients and satisfaction-related literature's review, and the total 20 were selected finally from them after excluding inadequate or overlapped items. Then, we conducted validation study in 214 subjects sampled randomly from 603 patients with Japanese cedar pollinosis who had visited clinics in 2003 by mailing self-administered questionnaire in spring, 2004. The response rate was 65.3%. In factor analysis, items were divided into four domains such as doctor-patient relationship, treatment outcome, geniality in hospital and convenience of medical service. The former two domains were the most correlated well with patient satisfaction. The quality of this questionnaire such as responsiveness, reliability, construct validity, convergent/discriminate validity, and clinical validity satisfied international standard. Thus, it was verified that our newly developed questionnaire is a useful and scientific tool for examination of patient satisfaction with medical care in allergic rhinitis.