Patient safety management systems in general hospitals require a comprehensive tool for assessing the expectations of inpatients across different wards. This study aimed to develop and psychometrically validate a new scale, the hospitalized patients’ expectations for treatment scale-clinician version (HOPE-C), to meet this requirement.
We interviewed 35 experts and 10 inpatients while developing the HOPE-C scale. The scale was initially designed with three dimensions: clinicians’ expectations regarding doctor-patient communication, clinicians’ expectations regarding treatment outcome, and clinicians’ expectations regarding disease management. We recruited 200 inpatients from a general hospital in China. At the same time, 51 clinicians were assigned to the enrolled patients who completed the HOPE-C to examine the reliability, validity, and psychometric characteristics of the questionnaire. We applied item analysis, assessed construct validity, evaluated internal consistency, and conducted a test-retest reliability analysis over 7 days.
Both exploratory and confirmatory analyses supported a 2-dimensional structure, comprising doctor-patient communication expectations and treatment outcome expectations, with favorable model fit parameters (root mean square residual [RMR] = 0.042, root mean square error of approximation [RMSEA] = 0.049, comparative fit index [CFI] = 0.989, Tucker-Lewis index [TLI] = 0.984). Item analysis demonstrated appropriate item design (
Our findings suggest that the HOPE-C is a reliable and valid assessment tool for measuring the expectations of inpatients in general hospitals. It effectively identifies patients’ expectations concerning doctor-patient communication and treatment outcomes.