title: A standardised questionnaire for evaluating hospital-based rotations in general practice vocational training.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The residency period of vocational training is a fundamental component for a general practitioner's (GP's) qualification. During the residency, teaching is given by consultants and staff from different medical disciplines who do not necessarily know the GP registrar's training objectives.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  To develop a standardised feedback questionnaire to evaluate residency attachments and enable GP registrars and their supervisors to discuss the actual training environment and areas for improvement.
  
  
  METHODS
  A cross-sectional study was carried out to assess GP registrars' ratings of items preselected by an expert group to reflect important elements in high-quality vocational training. We recruited GP registrars in Germany via mailing lists and online discussion forums and used the importance-severity-score method to score the content and importance of the selected items. On the basis of these ratings, we eliminated 74 items. This version of the questionnaire then underwent an intra-observer-reliability evaluation by the same GP registrars after eight weeks. Items with a correlation of less than 0.4 (Pearson correlation coefficient) were dropped or rephrased.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Our initial questionnaire featured 117 potential items. We reduced this to 43 items after the first study; two additional items were dropped following the reliability test.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  To our knowledge, this is the first standardised feedback questionnaire evaluating the residency period of vocational training. We hope our work will improve the quality of GPs' vocational training. The importance-severity-score method is a fast and efficient method for developing instruments using personal judgement to evaluate constructs.
authors.affiliation: GP Registrar and Researcher at the Department of General Practice, University of Marburg, Karl-von-Frisch-Str. 4,35043 Marburg, Germany. annika.viniol@staff.uni-marburg.de.
authors.forename: Annika
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Viniol
authors.affiliation: General Practitioner and Doctoral Candidate at the Department of General Practice, University of Marburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Martina
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lommler-Thamer
authors.affiliation: General Practitioner and Head of the Department of General Practice, University of Marburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Erika
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Baum
authors.affiliation: General Practitioner and Deputy Head of the Department of General Practice, University of Marburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Norbert Donner
authors.initials: ND
authors.lastname: Banzhoff
mesh_terms: D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D004503:Education, Medical, Graduate / Q000379:methods*; D005194:Family Practice / Q000193:education*; D058006:General Practice / Q000193:education*; D006801:Humans; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires / Q000592:standards*; D014829:Vocational Education / Q000379:methods*