Psychiatric outpatients and partial hospital patients indicate that the Clinically Useful Patient Satisfaction Scale (CUPSS) was minimally to not at all burdensome to complete, had good psychometric properties, and can discriminate amongst clinicians, a recent study found. Researchers sought to develop a new instrument assessing patients’ satisfaction with the initial psychiatric evaluation. They describe the development, reliability, and validity of the CUPSS, a brief, self-administered questionnaire covering 3 areas: clinician's attitude and behavior, office environment and staff, and overall satisfaction. A sample of psychiatric outpatients (n=412) and partial hospital patients (n=500) completed the measure following their initial meeting with the psychiatrist. They found:

• The scale had high internal consistency, and all item-scale correlations were significant.
• All items were significantly correlated with each of the indicators of global satisfaction.
• There was sufficient variability in satisfaction ratings to detect differences amongst clinicians.