A Comparison of Various Health Care Disciplines' Satisfaction with Clinical Training

• Activity Number: 105
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 8, 2005 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): Stephen J. Dienstfrey*+ and Evert Milander
• Companies: Schulman, Ronca & Bucuvalas, Inc. and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
• Keywords: Clinical training ; Satisfaction ; Scale development

Abstract

The Office of Academic Affiliations of the Veterans Health Administration began work on the Learners' Perception Survey (LPS) in 1999. The survey was developed after an extensive literature review and 15 focus group sessions were conducted in a variety of health care professions. The result was a questionnaire that asked about trainees' satisfaction on some 50 specific elements divided into four domains: Clinical Faculty and Preceptors, Learning Environment, Working Environment, and Physical Environment. Each year, the survey has gone through various changes to the point were the 2004 base questionnaire (additional questions were included for physician residents, medical students, and VA Special Fellows) had 66 specific elements divided among five domains---the original four plus Personal Experience. There was some concern that the growing length of the questionnaire was having a negative impact on the response rate. An earlier paper (2004) compared the results of various methods of developing a short form version of the basic LPS questionnaire using the entire dataset. The current paper develops a short form of the LPS for a variety of healthcare disciplines.