<sec><title>Objectives</title>The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) is a well-established and internationally recognised scale for measuring patients’ experience with hospital inpatient care. This study aimed to develop a Japanese version of the HCAHPS and to examine its structural validity, criterion-related validity and internal consistency reliability.

</sec><sec><title>Design</title>Multicentere cross-sectional study.

</sec><sec><title>Setting</title>A total of 48 hospitals in Japan.

</sec><sec><title>Participants</title>6522 patients aged ≥16 years who were discharged from the participating hospitals.

</sec><sec><title>Results</title>Confirmatory factor analysis showed excellent goodness of fit of the same factor structure as that of the original HCAHPS, with the following composites: communication with nurses, communication with doctors, responsiveness of hospital staff, hospital environment, communication about medicines and discharge information. All hospital-level Pearson correlation coefficients between the Japanese HCAHPS composites and overall hospital rating exceeded the criteria. Results of inter-item correlations indicated adequate internal consistency reliability.

</sec><sec><title>Conclusions</title>The Japanese HCAHPS has acceptable psychometric properties for assessing patients’ experience with hospital inpatient care. This scale could be used for quality improvement based on the assessment of patients’ experience with hospital care and for health services research in Japan.

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