JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic preventive measures, mental health care services were forced to reorganize and developed remote telehealth services. This led to include newer modes of receiving treatment, both internet-based and video-based therapies, to meet the patients’ need for help, while at the same time keeping the COVID-19 pandemic under control. This shift calls for evaluation of the patient experience during times of increased use of novel approaches of receiving treatment. Brief evaluation forms are ideal for this purpose.

Objective:

As there are no validated brief measures tools to evaluate patient-reported experiences in Norwegian mental health settings, we aimed to explore the internal consistency, and factor validity of the 4-item self-administrated Client Satisfaction Questionnaire (CSQ-4).

Methods:

We examined the internal consistency and factor structure of a brief digitally administrated patient satisfaction measure in a sample of 145 outpatients in Norwegian mental health settings during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Results:

The Internal consistency of a digital Norwegian CSQ-4 was high, with a Cronbach’s alpha of .92. A clear unidimensional structure (Eigenvalue = 3.22), which explained 80.4% of the variance, emerged from our data. A Mann-Whitney U-test found a non-significant difference in satisfaction between genders (U = 2546.5, p = .166). A spearman’s rank correlation between satisfaction and age in our data was not statistically significant, r (144) = .110, p = .189.

Conclusions:

A measurement tool such as the CSQ-4 would be a valuable resource to improve the development and application of digital mental health services. Our results may support the use of the Norwegian CSQ-4 as a valid and reliable measure of satisfaction with mental healthcare services. In addition, as the CSQ-4 is short and generic tool, it can be implemented in a wide range of routine evaluation of patient reported satisfaction with telehealth services.