Development of a Scale for Measuring Physician Perception: Physician Related Health Care Perception Scale

Aim: Recently increased incidence of workplace violence in health care highlights the need for investigating the causes of such changes in clinical practice settings. The focus on the changes in attitudes of patients let us wonder whether the physician perception of the patients has changed and what the current perception is. The objective was to build up a scale to measure patients’ perceptions of health care. Methods: For developing a new scale we decided eight factors to be included in the scale; respect, trust, patient-doctor relation, medical practice skills, being knowledgeable about the medicine as a job, the perceptions and reflections of doctors in media, thoughts about violence against physicians and comply to rules of hospital. 77 attitude sentences were created. The draft scale with these attitude sentences were reviewed by two psychiatrists and a family physician who have experience with scale development. According to received feedbacks, the attitude sentences were further revised. Randomly selected 93 patients, who are above 18 years of age and who are willing to participate, were included in the study. We measured sentences by 5 fold Likert scale. We analyzed data by factor and reliability methods in SPSS 13.00 for Windows and evaluated for validity. Principal Component Analysis and Varimax rotation were used. Results: We obtained a scale with 6 factors and 34 attitude sentences. Cronbachalpha value was 0.891 (corrected 0.894). Factors were; respect, trust, patientdoctor relation, being knowledgeable about the medicine as a job, thoughts about violence against physicians and comply to rules of hospital. According to Principal Component Analysis, total variance explained rate 58.8%. Conclusions: There is no scale in the literature to measure patients’ perception of health care, so this scientific scale makes a high contribution to the current literature.