Background Patient satisfaction is one of the relevant indicators of quality of care; however, measuring patient satisfaction had been criticised. A major criticism is that many instruments are not reliable and/or valid. The instruments should have enough discriminative power for benchmarking of the results. Objective To develop a "core questionnaire for the assessment of patient satisfaction in academic hospitals" (COPS) that is reliable and appropriate for benchmarking patient satisfaction results. Conclusions COPS is shown to be a feasible and reliable instrument to measure the satisfaction of patients in Dutch academic hospitals. It allows comparison of hospitals and gives benchmark information on a hospital as well as data on specialty levels and previous measurements, including best practices.

The RM seems to be a useful and feasible method to stimulate the doctors' reflection processes, resulting in implemented improvements.