Development of a questionnaire to assess interprofessional collaboration between two different care levels

Introduction. This paper reports the development and validation of a questionnaire to assess collaboration between clinical professionals from two different care levels (primary and specialised care), according to the clinicians' own perceptions. This questionnaire has been elaborated to be used as part of the monitoring and evaluation process of the integrated care pilots in the public Basque Health Service.

Methods. The process was carried out in four phases: development of the first version of the questionnaire, validation of the content, pre-testing, and evaluation of its construct validity and homogeneity in a sample of doctors and nurses. This last phase involved confirmatory factor analysis, as well as the calculation of Cronbach's α and various correlation coefficients.

Results. The process demonstrated that the theoretical content of the questionnaire was appropriate, and also that its items were clear, relevant and intelligible. The fit indices for the confirmatory factor analysis were: c² of 45.51 (p = 0.089), RMSEA of 0.043, RMR of 0.046, GFI of 0.92 and CFI of 0.99.

Discussion. The statistics indicate a good fit between the data and a conceptual two-factor structure, in which both personal relationships between professionals and characteristics of the organisational environment are understood to underlie interprofessional collaboration.

Conclusion. The end-product is a new instrument with good validity to assess the degree of interprofessional collaboration between clinicians working at two different levels of care.