Assessment of the quality of anaesthesia care requires clinically orientated, process of care measures and the measurement of client-assessed (patient and surgeon) outcomes. Anaesthetists and patients believe that mortality, post-operative nausea and vomi

If multi-item questionnaires are to be used by anaesthesiologists as instruments to measure patient satisfaction or quality of anaesthesia care, then the scores produced by these questionnaires must be shown to be reliable (reproducible), valid and suited to their measurement purpose. In this chapter, we hope to review the importance of reliability, validity, and suitability to questionnaire instruments. We detail the psychometric approach to questionnaire construction and provide examples drawn from the anaesthesia literature of multi-item questionnaires developed using psychometric techniques. Finally, we discuss future potential benefits that can be obtained from further application of psychometric methodology in anaesthesia research.