Objectives: To develop and explore the use of a patient satisfaction questionnaire based on patient perceptions of items which influence satisfaction and to explore patient and practitioner characteristics which influence the results.
Method: Twenty focus groups identified 39 items which were then assembled into a questionnaire which was evaluated by attendees at 133 Australian general practices.
Main outcome measures: Overall satisfaction with general practitioner services and the appropriateness of the 39 items identified by focus group participants; socio-demographic characteristics of patients and practitioners and the impact of these characteristics on the results; factor analysis of the relationship of the items to each other and to overall satisfaction.
Results: Questionnaires were completed by 12,605 patients of 133 general practices. Seventy-three percent of these patients reported they were overall very satisfied with the care they received and 26% were satisfied. There were five individual items for which an average of more than 10% of patients reported they were not satisfied: waiting time at the surgery (18%); ease of obtaining home visits (17%); ease of seeing the doctor out of normal hours (15%); cost of drugs (12%) and facilities for children in the waiting room (10%). Factors which were more likely to result in a report of patients being very satisfied included: patients being older; if patients had visited recently; if they had attended the practice for a long time; if they visited only one general practice and had more consultations in the past 12 months. Patients of solo practitioners were more likely to report they were satisfied with individual items and patients of practices of three or more practitioners were least likely. No significant differences between practices of different sizes in the level of overall satisfaction were detected. Factor analysis identified three major factors which we have described as containing interaction, technical and accessibility items. These three factors explained 44.4% of the variance in results.
Conclusion: This project found the items patients identified were similar to those identified by practitioners, and reiterated previous findings that there is substantial variability in the levels of satisfaction reported by patients of Australian general practices.