Patient satisfaction among combat veterans receiving specialty PTSD treatment.
BACKGROUND
Despite the difficulties with successfully developing effective treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), very little research has been conducted on veterans' perceptions of satisfaction with the treatments they receive through the VA.


OBJECTIVE
Our objective was to evaluate combat veterans' satisfaction with Veterans Affairs (VA) services and to evaluate the reliability and preliminary validity of a measure of patient satisfaction, the Charleston Psychiatric Outpatient Satisfaction Scale-VA PTSD Version, which was originally designed for general psychiatric outpatients.


METHODS
Fifty-one combat veterans currently receiving specialty mental health care at a VA outpatient PTSD clinic were asked to complete two instruments designed to assess their satisfaction with services provided within the VA mental health and primary care clinics.


RESULTS
Data show that the reliability (alpha = 0.96 and 0.95) and validity of these two measures of patient satisfaction were good and indicate that veterans receiving specialty mental health care for PTSD rate their mental health and primary care quite positively.


CONCLUSIONS
These results provide preliminary support for the internal reliability and convergent validity of a novel measure of patient satisfaction for use with combat veterans suffering from PTSD and treated within a VA hospital specialty mental health clinic; the results also support the satisfaction of these patients with mental health and primary care services received through the VA.
Frueh
B Christopher
BC
Medical University of South Carolina and Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Charleston 29401-5799, USA.
Pellegrin
Karen L
KL
Elhai
Jon D
JD
Hamner
Mark B
MB
Gold
Paul B
PB
Magruder
Kathryn M
KM
Arana
George W
GW