Objective To develop and validate a questionnaire to determine satisfaction with the hospital emergency department.

Design Cross-sectional study to validate a telephone questionnaire designed in Spanish by a panel of experts.

Setting The emergency department of Hospital Gregorio Marañón, a tertiary level hospital of the Spanish national health system.

Participants A sample of 651 emergency department patients completed the questionnaire.

Main Outcome Measures The psychometric properties of the questionnaire were evaluated; namely, construct, criterion validity, predictive validity and internal consistency.

Results Two dimensions—comfortable service and personalised service—were identified from the exploratory factor analysis, and these accounted for 63% of the variance. Both factors showed a positive correlation with the global assessment items ‘global satisfaction with the attention received in the emergency ward’ and ‘Would you recommend this emergency department?’ The predictive validity of the questionnaire was assessed by means of discriminant analysis, which showed that 66.7% of patients were correctly classified. Internal consistency measured by Cronbach's alpha resulted in a value greater than 0.80 for both dimensions.

Conclusions This questionnaire fulfils the necessary psychometric properties to be considered a useful and reliable tool for measuring patient satisfaction with hospital emergency services.