Objective: Developing a valid scale for measuring the quality of post-anaesthetic recovery (QoR) from the patients' point of view.
Methods: ASA I or II scheduled surgical patients were selected.
Setting: Hospital San Juan de Dios, Bogota, Profamilia's Sexual and Reproductive Health Clinic and Social Security's Clinica Carlos Lleras. Five phases: semistructured interviews for establishing different quality categories and items referred by patients (n=30); content analysis and categorisation to establish relevant items (n=42); facial validity (n=20); scale design and validation, QoR (n=283): main factor analysis, varimax rotation Cronbach's alpha coefficient was used for testing internal consistency. Concurrent and discriminating criteria were validated by using non-parametrical statistics]; and reproducibility (n=100), tested by Kendal's concordance coefficient.
Results: The QoR was constructed in Colombian Spanish with 14 items and 3 domains, general quality (8 items), recovery room (5 items) and pain (one item). The QoR showed good internal consistency (Cronbach = 0.8783). The QoR positively correlated (Spearman's rho > 0.39) with 3 out of 5 scales and found differences by gender, kind of surgery, surgical site and kind of anaesthesia (Ji2 and K. Wallis, p < 0.05). The QoR had good reproducibility (Kendal = 0.6378, p = 0.0335).
Conclusion: The QoR is the first valid scale constructed from the patient's point of view for measuring the quality of post-anaesthetic recovery.