A survey on provision of patient-centred care by a government homeopathic hospital in India

Objective: We derived 32 indicators from the International Alliance of Patients’ Organization’s (IAPO) patient-centred healthcare indicator review those seemed to be applicable for a homeopathic context and intended to test it on the patients suffering from various chronic conditions and visiting the out-patients of a homeopathic hospital in West Bengal, India. Methods: The patient-centred care (PCC) questionnaire was developed in eight steps, and approved by an expert committee. It had three subscales – system level indicators [SLIs: 14 items], patient feedback indicators [PFIs: 3 items], and practitioner level indicators [PLIs: 15 items]. Face validity was tested by 15 people for comprehension. Test-retest reliability was tested on 30 patients and internal consistency on systematically sampled 377 patients. Results: The overall PCC-32 score% appeared to be moderate, of 67.63% ± 14.39; and the subscale scores were 64.82% ± 14.95, 65.03% ± 29.47, and 70.77% ± 11.96. Only PFI scores differed significantly by education [P = 0.009] and health status [P = 0.006]. The questionnaire showed acceptable item-corrected correlations for the subscales [SLIs: ICC 0.98 (0.97, 0.98); PFIs: 0.89 (0.87, 0.91); PLIs: 0.98 (0.97, 0.98)], considerable test-rest reliability [SLIs: 0.19 – 1.00; PFIs: 0.60 – 0.65; PLIs: 0.07 – 1.00], strong internal consistency [Cronbach’s alpha = 0.87 overall and 0.84 – 0.87 for subscales], and considerable responsiveness [0.3 – 2.2]. Conclusion: The provision of patient-centred care by a government homeopathic hospital in West Bengal, India appeared to be quite promising. The psychometric properties of the Bengali PCC-32 were satisfactory, rendering it a valid and reliable instrument.