Cross-cultural evaluation of the relevance of the HCAHPS survey in five European countries

Abstract

Objective: To describe the systematic language translation and cross-cultural evaluation process that assessed the relevance of the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey in five European countries prior to national data collection efforts.

Design: An approach involving a systematic translation process, expert review by experienced researchers and a review by 'patient' experts involving the use of content validity indexing techniques with chance correction.

Setting: Five European countries where Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian and Polish are spoken.

Participants: 'Patient' experts who had recently experienced a hospitalization in the participating country. Main OutcomeMeasure(s) Content validity indexing with chance correction adjustment providing a quantifiable measure that evaluates the conceptual, contextual, content, semantic and technical equivalence of the instrument in relationship to the patient care experience.

Results: All translations except two received 'excellent' ratings and no significant differences existed between scores for languages spoken in more than one country. Patient raters across all countries expressed different concerns about some of the demographic questions and their relevance for evaluating patient satisfaction. Removing demographic questions from the evaluation produced a significant improvement in the scale-level scores (P= .018). The cross-cultural evaluation process suggested that translations and content of the patient satisfaction survey were relevant across countries and languages.

Conclusions: The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey is relevant to some European hospital systems and has the potential to produce internationally comparable patient satisfaction scores.

Figure 1

Cross-cultural validity in instrument translation: definitions. Adapted from Flaherty et al. [28], p. 258.