The MedRisk instrument for measuring patient satisfaction with physical therapy care: validation in the Singapore outpatient physiotherapy setting

ABSTRACT

Background

Patient satisfaction (PS) serves an important role in physiotherapy. Being able to measure PS is important for improving service delivery. The MedRisk has not been validated in the Singapore population.

Objective

To validate the use of the MedRisk instrument for measuring PS in a local outpatient clinic, and to explore if PS was affected by continuity of care or individual items in the MedRisk.

Methods

Three hundred and one participants who underwent physiotherapy in the clinic completed the MedRisk instrument. Factor analysis was adopted to group the individual items in the MedRisk questionnaire into components and multiple regression was conducted to explore items predicting the two global ratings.

Results

Factors affecting PS can be grouped into two distinct components, therapist-related attributes and organizational factors (47.7% and 11.8% of variance explained, respectively). All questionnaire items were retained. Giving patients a home exercise program (overall satisfaction [OS] r = 0.691 and willingness to return to the same clinic [WR] r = 0.578) and listening to the patients’ concerns (OS r = 0.685, WR r = 0.569) correlated with both overall satisfaction and willingness to return. Continuity of care was not correlated to overall satisfaction (r = 0.001, p = .988) or willingness to return for treatment (r = 0.069, p = .234).

Conclusion

The MedRisk instrument is applicable to the local population. Patient satisfaction with outpatient physiotherapy services was predominantly influenced by therapist-related attributes.

KEYWORDS:

• Patient satisfaction
• physiotherapy
• surveys and questionnaires
• outpatient
• continuity of care

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Professors Paul Beattie and Phil McClure for kindly allowing us to use the MedRisk instrument. The authors would also like to thank the NUHS Research Support Unit, Singapore, for editing this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.