Obituary: C. W. Chacko, 1912--1973

Abstract

Patient-centered outcomes are significantly modified by long-term home non-invasive ventilation (NIV), but a short, self-administered, specific tool for routine clinical assessment is lacking. The aim of this study was to develop and validate the S³-NIV questionnaire, a short questionnaire to measure respiratory <b>s</b>ymptoms, <b>s</b>leep quality and NIV-related <b>s</b>ide-effects. Stable patients under long-term home NIV were recruited from three outpatient NIV services. Questionnaire development consisted of a selection of core items for analysis, followed by item reduction, validation and test-retest reliability. 338 patients completed a 22-item questionnaire. Eleven items were removed because of non-scalability (n=2), redundancy (n=8) and lack of fit (n=1). The final version of the S³-NIV questionnaire consisted of 11 items covering two dimensions: “respiratory symptoms” (Cronbach alpha=0.84) and “sleep &amp; NIV-related side-effects” (Cronbach alpha=0.77). Convergent validity was high between the “respiratory symptoms” subscale of the S³-NIV questionnaire and the St. George9s Respiratory Questionnaire (rho=−0.76; p&lt;0.001), as well as the “sleep &amp; NIV side-effects” subscale and the Quebec Sleep Questionnaire (rho=0.51; p&lt;0.001). The S³-NIV questionnaire had a good test-retest reliability after 4 weeks (intraclass correlation coefficient=0.72). The S³-NIV questionnaire is a short, valid and repeatable, self-completed tool for the routine clinical assessment of patients undergoing home NIV.