Review for 10.1186/1471-230X-8-25 (2008)

Reviewer's report
Title:Quality of health care and patient satisfaction in liver disease: the
development of the QUOTE-Liver questionnaire
Version: 1Date:11 November 2007
Reviewer: Ann A Jacoby
Reviewer's report:
General
Development of psychometrically sound measures of patient satisfaction is a
worthy enterprise; and this paper presents development of a liver disease
specific measure which is grounded in a wider, methodologically rigorous
initiative. In the background, the authors provide a good introduction to the
problems of measuring patient satisfaction; and a good justification for their own
work, including the theoretical basis on which it rests.
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Major Compulsory Revisions (that the author must respond to before a decision
on publication can be reached)
Abstract – under Results, line 2 – use of the word ‘satisfying’ is somewhat
confusing here, given the focus of the questionnaire – I suggest replacing it with
‘acceptable’
Methods – these are well described, but I would welcome some further
information about the following issues
• About the 11 patients who took part in the FGDs - how were they selected
(consecutively, or using some sort of sampling matrix?) How many people were
approached who refused? Why was sampling done in one centre only?
• Why to the authors fix a priori on 20 items? This seems at odds with the idea
that patients identify the most important items – since in principle these could
have numbered more than 20. Can the authors tell the reader what the next
lowest importance score was below the 7.15 for item 18 (and excluding the two
disease-specific items) – to reassure the reader that a 20-item cut-off was
appropriate.
• Can the authors provide information under ‘scoring and interpretation’ about the
maximum/minimum possible scores, against which the reader can set the
achieved scores presented in Table 2.
• Also, in the same section, though this may simply be a problem of translation, it
is difficult for the reader to see what difference there is between the two response
options, ‘actually yes’ and ‘yes’ – can the authors clarify.
• The authors state that a researcher observed patients completing
questionnaires to decide whether there were feasibility problems – did they
conduct formal ‘cognitive interviews’ with these patients as is now generally
accepted as most appropriate, or simply note possible problems. If the latter, the
authors may wish to acknowledge the limitations of not formally and
systematically conducting a feasibility assessment.
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Minor Essential Revisions (such as missing labels on figures, or the wrong use of
a term, which the author can be trusted to correct)
P.7, para 2, line 2 – replace ‘chose for’ by ‘opted for’
P.7, para 3 6 – QUOTE wrongly spelt.
P.8, re-title heading ‘data analysis’ as ‘psychometric methods’
P.11, para 1, line 5 – replace ‘according to’ by ‘defined by’
P.11, para 4, last line – replace ‘reflex’ by ‘reflect’
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Discretionary Revisions (which the author can choose to ignore)
None.
What next?: Unable to decide on acceptance or rejection until the authors have
responded to the major compulsory revisions
Level of interest: An article whose findings are important to those with closely
related research interests
Quality of written English: Needs some language corrections before being
published
Statistical review: Yes, but I do not feel adequately qualified to assess the
statistics.
Declaration of competing interests:
I declare that I have no competing interests.