Patient satisfaction with pharmaceutical care: update of a validated instrument.

OBJECTIVE: To develop a questionnaire for measuring patient satisfaction with pharmaceutical care and to establish its factorial composition.
DESIGN: Single intervention, noncomparative, 20-item self-administered questionnaire.
SETTING: Iowa. PARTICIPANTS: Seven hundred seventy-five prescription patrons of eight community pharmacies whose pharmacists had received training in pharmaceutical care but who had not yet implemented it.
INTERVENTIONS: An instrument originally developed to measure patient satisfaction with traditional community pharmacy services was modified to focus on the elements of pharmaceutical care. This revised questionnaire was mailed to participants. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Participant responses to items in the questionnaire.
RESULTS: The survey response rate was 55%. Factor analysis and item analysis identified two dimensions of pharmaceutical care. We labeled the dimensions Friendly Explanation (including items related to friendliness of care, the setting of care, and medication counseling) and Managing Therapy (items dealing with the concept of pharmaceutical care-managing drug therapy and solving therapy problems). Respondents scored items on the Managing Therapy scale lower than they did items on the Friendly Explanation scale. The scales were highly correlated. Two other hypothesized dimensions of care-Consideration/Caring Relationships and Setting-were subsumed in the final scale of Friendly Explanation.
CONCLUSION: The instrument provides information on patients' satisfaction with two dimensions of pharmacy services. The instrument may be useful to practicing pharmacists, but it should be used cautiously until it is tested among patrons of pharmacies known to provide different levels of care.