Multicenter validation of the Quality of Trauma Care Patient-Reported Experience Measure (QTAC-PREM).

BACKGROUND: Incorporating patient and family perspectives into injury care quality assessment is a necessary part of comprehensive quality improvement. However, tools to measure patient and family perspectives of injury care are lacking. Therefore, our objective was to assess the psychometric properties of the Quality of Trauma Care Patient-Reported Experience Measure (QTAC-PREM), the first measure developed to assess patient experiences with overall injury care.

METHODS: We conducted a prospective multicenter cohort study of adult injury patients recruited from three trauma centers. Patients or surrogates completed an acute care survey measure in the hospital and a post-acute care survey measure after hospital discharge.

RESULTS: Four hundred participants (78%) completed the acute care measure, and 207 (59%) completed the post-acute care measure. We identified three subscales on the acute measure and two subscales on the post-acute measure. All subscales and items had evidence of construct validity. Four subscales had good internal consistency, and three were independent predictors of participants' overall ratings of injury care quality. The majority of items demonstrated suitable test-retest reliability. Comparison of QTAC-PREM scores with those of an existing patient experience tool, the Hospital version of the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS), demonstrated evidence of appropriate divergent and convergent validity.

CONCLUSION: This study demonstrates that the QTAC-PREM is feasible to implement at trauma centers and provides evidence of validity and reliability. The tool may be useful to incorporate patient perspectives into trauma care quality measurement and improvement.