Abstract
BackgroundIn this study, we aimed to develop and validate an instrument that could be used by patients with cancer to evaluate their quality of palliative care.MethodsDevelopment of the questionnaire followed the four-phase process: item generation and reduction, construction, pilot testing, and field testing. Based on the literature, we constructed a list of items for the quality of palliative care from 104 quality care issues divided into 14 subscales. We constructed scales of 43 items that only the cancer patients were asked to answer. Using relevance and feasibility criteria and pilot testing, we developed a 44-item questionnaire. To assess the sensitivity and validity of the questionnaire, we recruited 220 patients over 18 years of age from three Korean hospitals.ResultsFactor analysis of the data and fit statistics process resulted in the 4-factor, 32-item Quality Care Questionnaire-Palliative Care (QCQ-PC), which covers appropriate communication with health care professionals (ten items), discussing value of life and goals of care (nine items), support and counseling for needs of holistic care (seven items), and accessibility and sustainability of care (six items). All subscales and total scores showed a high internal consistency (Cronbach alpha range, 0.89 to 0.97). Multi-trait scaling analysis showed good convergent (0.568–0.995) and discriminant (0.472–0.869) validity. The correlation between the total and subscale scores of QCQ-PC and those of EORTC QLQ-C15-PAL, MQOL, SAT-SF, and DCS was obtained.ConclusionThis study demonstrates that the QCQ-PC can be adopted to assess the quality of care in patients with cancer.
Highlights
In this study, we aimed to develop and validate an instrument that could be used by patients with cancer to evaluate their quality of palliative care
We investigated and used the Assessment of Chronic Illness Care (ACIC) questionnaire and the Patient Assessment of Chronic Illness Care (PACIC) questionnaire translated by National Evidence-based Healthcare Collaborating Agency (NECA) in a previous study, which was a study of the performance evaluation methods of sub-categories in the management of chronic disease patients in a community by the primary health care center (2015)
Most patients (96.4%) completed the questionnaire, but eight patients were excluded from the analysis because they did not answer more than three items
Summary
We aimed to develop and validate an instrument that could be used by patients with cancer to evaluate their quality of palliative care. Yun et al BMC Palliative Care (2018) 17:40 with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial, and spiritual”. It was demonstrated that early palliative care resulted in a significant improvement in QOL [5,6,7], and longer survival among patients with cancer [5, 8]. Most of the palliative care assessment tools developed so far measure the QOL of the patient, not the quality of care [19,20,21,22,23]
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