Quality In Home Care: A Methodological Proposal To Measure Patient Satisfaction

While considerable attention has been given to the development of patient satisfaction measure in acute care and mental health, existing measures of older patients' satisfaction with home care services suffer from several shortcomings. Against this background, interest has arisen in the development of an instrument to measure satisfaction that is able to catch the various aspects of service quality that is called in Italy “Integrated Home Care”. This paper describes the development of Home Care Satisfaction Measure, that covers three dimensions of service quality following the Article 14 of the Law 502/1992 that emphasises the so-called “perceived quality”. The three dimensions are accessibility, efficiency, and effectiveness. A composite index of perceived quality of care based on the patients' evaluations of different domains of service and specific items within domain, was built. Finally, the instrument was able to assess the ability to measure, through relatives (and/or other delegates), the satisfaction of mentally disabled patients. The instrument can be used for program evaluations, quality assurance or improvement systems, clinical research or general population surveys.