Developing evidenced-based quality assessment checklist for real practice in primary health care using standardized patients: a systematic review

Abstract

Background: The aim of this review was to explore the quality assessment checklists development methods in previous researches using standardized patients (SPs), as well as to propose an evidence-based checklist development procedure for quality assessment of common conditions in primary health care (PHC) settings.Methods: We conducted a systematic review of studies that described checklist development method and extracted the methodology in terms of the developer, the basis and processes. Based on that, we formulated the development procedure according to the recommendations of the WHO Handbook for Guideline Development. Results: We identified a total of 13 articles, and proposed the following five key steps: (I) Forming a multidisciplinary team; (II) Selecting and evaluating relevant references; (III) Extracting medical information and forming the basic items; (IV) Clinical expert consensus on the items; and (V) Pre-testing the item pool and determining final items.Discussion: SP has been proven to be an effective method to assess performance in practice. There are still some deficiencies in the developing of case-specific checklists using SPs. To ensure the validity and reliability of checklists, the development processes need to be more standardized and procedural.