Satisfaction with Cancer Care – Core questionnaire

Patient satisfaction is now recognized as an important indicator of care quality. Measures of patient satisfaction with care can facilitate monitoring initiatives for care improvement over time. The EORTC Quality of Life Group has cross-culturally validated a stand-alone in-patient satisfaction with cancer care questionnaire, the IN-PATSAT32. Advances in cancer care delivery required further development of this questionnaire to assess patients’ perceived quality of the care received across cancer care settings, i.e., during a hospital stay or ambulatory cancer care. Phase I to III of this process resulted in the EORTC PATSAT-C33 satisfaction with cancer care core questionnaire to assess cancer care delivery as a whole, and the EORTC OUT-PATSAT7 module to assess specific ambulatory cancer care aspects. The Phase IV large psychometric field-study is now completed.

The Phase IV large scale cross-cultural psychometric assessment of the EORTC PATSAT-C33 and OUT-PATSAT7 is now completed. We investigated their cross-cultural applicability and acceptability, scale structure, reliability including test-retest and internal consistency, validity, including construct (known-group comparisons), convergent and divergent validity, and responsiveness to change. The sample size reached 690 patients and ensured balanced patients’ representation across cancer care settings and cultural/geographical areas. Twenty institutions from European as well as Asian and North/South American regions participated in the study. Among results, this study confirmed the hypothesized scale structure and provided a scoring algorithm.

Further analyses are underway including assessing the cross-cultural invariance of psychometric properties.

Two scientific publications have been submitted in peer-reviewed journals. Two other scientific publications are in preparation.

Patient satisfaction is now recognized as an important indicator of care quality. Measures of patient satisfaction with care can facilitate monitoring initiatives for care improvement over time. The EORTC Quality of Life Group has developed and validated a satisfaction with cancer care questionnaire to assess cancer care delivery across cancer care settings (EORTC PATSAT-C33) as well as a module to assess satisfaction with specific ambulatory cancer care aspects (EORTC OUT-PATSAT7).