Two professional attitudes measurement scales evaluated by patients for general practitioners and dispensing chemists

To construct and validate a scale of Professional Attitudes for both General Practitioners (in french, Attitudes Professionnelles des Médecins Generalistes) and dispensing chemists (Attitudes Professionnelles des Pharmaciens d’Officine). Methods: Stage 1. The construction and qualitative validation of a scale. By interviewing 40 patients in a preventive-care center in east of France in addition to 21 general practitioners and 22 dispensing chemists, we targeted items which could possibly help us formalize a theoretical construction of professional attitudes which intervened in the instauration and follow-up of patient treatments. Then, with the help of a group of experts, we determined which generic items in the questionnaire could be validated and, finally, identified the functions which fulfilled these attitudes. Stage 2. We statistically validated the APMG and APPO scales and then studied the classic metric characteristics of the scales by using a questionnaire which was auto-administered to 393 patients from East of France. We have completed this validation with a differential item functioning analysis to determine if the questions have similar properties among men and women. Results: 15 relational items in general practitioners and 9 in dispensing chemists were identified. They are associated with information, communication and education. Each scale is one-dimensional. Analysis showed high internal coherence (Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was 0.91 and 0.87 respectively) and acceptable reproducibility (intra-class correlation coefficients were respectively 0.74 and 0.72). Differential item functioning analysis for gender is in progress. Conclusion: The professional attitudes, we isolated represent important criteria in the quality of interpersonal doctor-patient and chemist-patient relationships. The metric characteristics of the two scales were deemed satisfactory. This suggests that they can be used as an aid in training in the healthcare professional-patient relationship, in decision-making and in assessing relational competencies