Keep generic prems short and usable

Patient-experience questionnaires were often tied to a particular service or patient group, making them hard to use across settings and burdensome to administer. GS-PEQ was designed to identify a small, broadly useful core that could support evaluation across different health services.

Researchers built a 23-item generic questionnaire from previously tested Norwegian group-specific surveys and tested it with nine user groups in one health trust. From 1,324 returned questionnaires, they selected ten items using applicability, importance, and comprehensiveness criteria. The resulting measure covers perceived outcome or benefit, clinician services, involvement, incorrect treatment, information, organisation, and accessibility.

GS-PEQ offers a common item set, but its developers explicitly said that psychometric properties and relevance required further evaluation in other settings and countries. The lesson is that generic wording creates the possibility of comparison; it does not prove comparability across services, populations, or national contexts.

GS-PEQ can be used alone or alongside other instruments. This makes it a useful model for a compact common module, with setting-specific questions added only where they are needed; it is not, however, a national programme architecture with collection, adjustment, or public-reporting rules.

GS-PEQ is generic across health-service settings, but a respondent still rates a particular service experience. It is therefore primarily a touchpoint or episode measure, with one perceived-benefit item reaching slightly beyond service process. It is not an end-to-end pathway instrument or a comprehensive measure of long-term life impact.

Every item in a short instrument has to earn its place. GS-PEQ excluded candidate items that had more than 20% “not applicable” responses in any user group, retained items people considered important, and limited the number of items from any one dimension to maintain coverage. The lesson is to test relevance, salience, and conceptual coverage together, rather than selecting only the highest-scoring or easiest questions.

The GS-PEQ development study used mailed and personally distributed questionnaires; it does not present the instrument as a real-time feedback tool. Its timing lesson is limited: a short questionnaire reduces burden, but it does not by itself create an operational feedback loop.

GS-PEQ's development study did not use a distinctive digital method: seven user groups received questionnaires by mail and two by personal distribution.

GS-PEQ was derived from six earlier Norwegian patient-experience questionnaires, then tested across nine user groups. Its item-selection method was explicit, but the authors also called for further psychometric evaluation and relevance testing in other settings and countries.

The available source is the original 2011 development study and does not document a later GS-PEQ refresh or current programme governance.

• GS-PEQ development study - original 2011 development study used throughout this profile.