Development of pain assessment scale for cognitively impaired elderly and its reliability and validity test

Abstract

Objective To develop pain assessment scale for cognifively impaired elderly (PACIE) and to test its reliabihty and validity. Methods Based on the foreign related pain assessment tools, the pain as-sessment scale for cognitively impaired elderly was developed. Five experts specialized in pain, anaesthesia and nursing were invited to evaluate the content validity of the pain assessment instrument and made modification. Reliability and validity of the pain assessment instruments was evaluated. Results PACIE had 8 items, index of content validity (CVI) of PACIE was 0.978, factor analysis demonstrated that two factors soluted in PACIE, that cumulative explained 69.008% of the total variability, the two factors were named pain objective factor and pain subjective factor. PACIE and NRS were significantly correlated, it could identify pain and painlessness patients overtly that demonstrate the discriminate validity was fine. Adequate levels of inter-rater reliability of PACIE was achieved between two raters with the intra-class correlation coefficient as 0.954 (95%CI=0.812～ 0.989). Satisfactory test-retest reliability was achieved with the Cronbach'α ot as 0.851. Conclusions The pain assessment scale for cognitively impaired elderly (PAC1E) has satisfactory validity and reliability, is suit-able for assessing the pain indentity of cognitively impaired elderly. Key words: Cognitive impairment; Pain; Assessment; Validity; Reliability