Questionnaires that measure the quality of relationships between patients and primary care providers: a systematic review
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Barnes, Katelyn A
Crossland, Lisa
Nicholson, Caroline
Jackson, Claire
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Abstract
Background: International guidance on models of care stress the importance of good quality, continuous patient-provider relationships to support high quality and efficient care and hospital avoidance. However, assessing the quality of patient-provider relationships is challenging due to its experiential nature. The aim of this study was to undertake a systematic review to identify questionnaires previously developed or used to assess the quality of continuous relationships between patients and their provider in primary care.
Methods: MEDLINE, PubMed, Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) and SCOPUS databases were searched for English language studies published between 2009 and 2017. Key terms used identified studies conducted in the primary care setting examining relationships between patients and providers. Studies that focused on the conceptualisation, development, testing or review of a questionnaire, or studies that used a questionnaire for assessing the quality of continuous relationships between patients and providers were eligible. Studies that did not assess quality via a questionnaire, only assessed single aspects of relationships, only assessed single encounters, assessed transitions between settings or assessed relationships using an index were excluded. Information on validity testing of each relevant questionnaire identified from articles was reviewed to inform recommendations for future research and evaluation.
Results: Twenty-seven studies met the eligibility criteria, including 14 unique questionnaires. The questionnaires were diverse in length, scope, focus and level of validity testing. Five questionnaires were considered not feasible for future use due to size and lack of development work. Three questionnaires were considered strongest candidates for use in future work based on being relevant to the topic and primary care setting, freely available in English and not needing additional pilot work prior to use. These three questionnaires were the Care Continuity Across Levels of Care Scale, the Nijmegan Continuity Questionnaire and the Patient-Doctor Depth of Relationship Tool.
Conclusions: This study provides an overview of 14 unique questionnaires that have been used to assess the quality of continuous relationships between patients and primary care providers. The decision to use one of the questionnaires in future work requires careful consideration, including the scope, length, validation testing, accessibility of the questionnaires and their alignment with the initiative being evaluated.
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BMC HEALTH SERVICES RESEARCH
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18
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© The Author(s). 2018 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
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Nursing
Health services and systems
Public health