Phase I
Expert Review and questionnaire translation
A team of 8 primary care experts (3 policymakers, 1 public health specialist and 4 primary healthcare providers) reviewed the PCPI-S instrument to assess items relevance and acceptance for use in Malaysia. No items were dropped. The complexity and singularity of the PCC framework directly correlates to the difficulty of translation. Minor modifications were made on the terminology used and sentence structure to reflect a culturally, semantically and regionally appropriate questionnaire.
Demographic background of pre-test respondents
Respondents (n=194) were recruited from 20 primary care clinics in 4 major states in Malaysia over five rounds of pre-tests; with 4 clinics involved in each round. The mean of respondents’ service years was 10.9 ± 6.6 (0.2 - 31 years). Majority of the respondents were nurses (n=82, 42%). Other sociodemographic characteristics are presented in Table 1.
Behaviour coding
Participants required approximately 20 minutes to complete the questionnaire. During the cognitive debriefing session, respondents were also asked 22 specific probing questions, developed by the authors (Appendix 1). Issues indicating comprehension problems across the pre-tests is shown in Figure 1.
Most of the modifications focused on improving individual translations in each item. For example, 64 respondents requested for clarification (Code 1) across all the 59 items in the questionnaire, necessitating substantial questionnaire modification. These can be broadly categorised into seven areas (Table 2): (1) words/phrases which were ambiguous, (2) synonyms, (3) grammatical meaning, (4) homonyms, (5) compound words, (6) unfamiliarity with subject experiences, and (7) words bearing emotional weight and action words. One-quarter of respondents requested clarification on item “I continuously look for opportunities to improve the care experiences”. Reconciled comments revealed that respondents were unsure of the recipient of the care experiences in the question. Thus, examples were provided in the revised question which now read: “I continuously look for opportunities to improve the care experiences (example patient, family members, healthcare provider)”.
Modifications (such as sentence restructuring) were made to improve discrepancy in cultural and language aspect. In items E17 and J35, the translated term for the word “challenge” in Malay, “mempertikai” appeared too intimidating for the respondents; suggesting an expression of sharp disapproval or criticism of someone. Comments reconciled from respondents viewed “challenging someone” as a negative and unacceptable practice in the local culture. Instead, respondents suggested alternative (translated) terms such as “negotiate”, “rebuke”, “advice” or “offer” but were not accepted in the adapted questionnaire as the authors felt that it does not reflect the intended meaning of “stimulating or triggering by the way of disputing someone”. The term “mempertikai” was therefore retained.
Overall, respondents seemed to be confused with the term “person” in the questionnaire and wanted clarification whether it was referring to a patient. They expressed to be more familiar to the ‘patient-centred care’ term. Following this, the definition of person-centred care was included as an introductory statement to describe the person as the patient, carer/family member and healthcare provider.
A detailed listing of issues and solutions are presented in Appendix 2 and Appendix 3.
Rating scale
Respondents was observed to rate highly on all constructs of the questionnaire (mean score between 3.9 and 4.3) in the first 2 pre-tests. Cognitive debriefing revealed inaccurate rating as respondents misconstrued the meaning of the “agree” scale as personal opinion of “what should be carried out”, instead of “what is currently practised”. Furthermore, respondents revealed it was difficult to select “disagree” as it implied that they object to the ideas being proposed, or they were not competent in doing their work.
The scale was then changed to a 5-point frequency rating of “never – rarely – sometimes – often – very often” to adequately capture the level of practice. Subsequent pre-tests indicated differences across constructs, with the lowest mean score in “supportive organizational systems” (mean score 3.2 ± 0.68), “potential for innovation and risk-taking” (mean score 3.4 ± 0.62) and “clarity of beliefs and values” (mean score 3.4 ± 0.57). Independent sample t-test showed significant mean differences and p-value, favouring the use of frequency-based scale (Figure 2).
Phase II
Respondents
A total of 1,133 participants from 16 public primary care clinics in a southern state of Malaysia were invited to participate in this phase, with an overall response rate of 81.1% (Table 3). Thirty-five respondents repeated the questionnaire two weeks later. Respondents’ mean service years was 8.9 ± 6.7 (range 0.1 to 36 years). Nurses, which included matrons, sisters, staff nurses and community nurses, comprised half of the total respondents (50.2%).
Mean scores
Mean scores ranged from 2.92 to 4.39 and were mostly positively scored. The higher scores therefore coincided with high ceiling effects in 21 items (Table 4).
Internal consistency
The overall Cronbach’s alpha for the PCPI-S questionnaire was satisfactory (α=0.96), indicating that the items measured the same underlying constructs. Several domains had value lower than 0.7, possibly due to the small amount of variance among the respondents and fewer items constituting the construct. The item-scale correlations were generally good, with all item-scale correlations found between 0.4 and 0.75.
Test -retest reliability
The test–retest reliability of the questionnaire was satisfactory, with an intra-class correlation coefficient of 0.60, (95% CI: 0.49 - 0.73, p<.001). The correlation coefficients for each item by domain are shown in Table 4.
Exploratory Factor Analysis
The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy of 0.953 and significance of Bartlett’s test of sphericity (χ2 (1711) = 25404.292, p < .005) signified data adequacy for analysis through data reduction procedure. The total variance explained at 60.85% was considered acceptable.
Figure 3 shows the item factor loadings and 11 components that emerged with a computed Eigenvalue greater than 1.
Factor Interpretation
The 11 components differed from the original 17 constructs that formed the PCPI-S instrument. Component 1 included all the items of domain ‘Care Processes’ of the framework, except for m44 which did not achieve the minimum loading. Component 2, 9 and 11 were noted similar to the original constructs of ‘Supportive Organisational Systems’, ‘Knowing Self’ and ‘Professionally Competent’. Component 3 were deemed related to ‘team building’, as all 8 items pointed towards encouraging one another towards improvement. Component 4 comprised of all same 5 items construct ‘shared decision-making systems’ with the additional h26, interpreted as an embedded process of decision-making in the clinic. Component 5 was associated with ‘quality of work’ in which healthcare providers strived to give their best in the assigned tasks within the allocated working hours. Component 6 was closely linked to ‘working overtime’ or needing extra time to perform certain tasks. Cognitive debriefing findings indicated that respondents felt that some tasks (specifically items c9, c10 and c12) were only feasible to be carried out after working hours or on weekends. This was given the high workload and busy schedule in the public primary care clinics. Component 7 was centred on ‘quality improvement processes’ which included care enhancement and consideration of physical environment. Component 8 was possibly explained by ‘team reflection’ from items that denoted recognition of need for skill mix within a team. An overarching theme of ‘autonomy in patients and family members’ was considered to suit component 10. However, these 3 items were also closely loaded into component 1, suggesting that the autonomous decision-making may also occur during the patient care process.