The Development of a Knowledge Test on Transgender Patients' Care.

Jonathan Hernández-Agosto,Edgar Carlo-Frontera,Andrés Rodríguez-Ochoa,Darlene Santiago-Quiñones,Kyle Melin,Jurynelliz Rosa-Vega

doi:10.3390/ijerph17197192

Jonathan Hernández-Agosto, Edgar Carlo-Frontera + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17197192

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Abstract

The objective of this study was to develop an assessment instrument to measure the effects of a continuing education intervention on 3 domains in pharmacists’ knowledge needed to provide pharmaceutical care for transgender patients: (1) foundations of gender-affirming care, (2) health disparities and the specific needs of transgender patients, and (3) hormone treatments for transgender patients. Multiple-choice questions were developed, and an initial item bank of 47 items was drafted. Item bank revision was conducted by content matter experts, while feedback from 8 practicing pharmacists was provided for face validity and further insights. A preliminary test, containing 42 items was administered to 64 pharmacists before and after a three-hour continuing education intervention. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient yielded a value of 0.65 as a pre-test and 0.77 as a post-test. Items were less difficult to answer by participants after taking the three-hour continuing education, showing better discrimination among high and low performers in the instrument administration as post-test, as well as better correlation when comparing participants’ performance in the overall score against item-level performance. Psychometric evidence supports further instrument examination, which can improve this tool to measure gains in pharmacists’ knowledge related to the care of transgender patients.

Highlights

One of the biggest challenges researchers often face is how to develop a new instrument, especially when phenomena to be measured is not widely addressed in the literature and the development of a new tailored instrument becomes the best decision
Data collection on items was made in the form of pre- and post-test administrations. While this step does not correspond necessarily to usual validation procedures, as established before, we considered it important to highlight that this test was created primarily to measure pharmacists’ knowledge to provide pharmaceutical care to transgender patients, as a result of a three hour continuing education (CE) activity, which was part of a research project of a group of students of the School of Pharmacy (SOP)
We present a new test that was developed to assess pharmacist knowledge related to pharmaceutical care for transgender patients and the preliminary validation procedures and results for the instrument

Summary

Introduction

One of the biggest challenges researchers often face is how to develop a new instrument, especially when phenomena to be measured is not widely addressed in the literature and the development of a new tailored instrument becomes the best decision. Researchers must consider the relevance of the instrument they want to use to measure any construct or phenomena and place particular interest in research questions as well as the quality of the instrument [1]. Like any other academic field dedicated to the improvement of knowledge by means of research and data gathering, pharmacy education is often at the crossroads of the adoption of existing instruments and the development of new ones to measure health-related phenomena [1]. Public Health 2020, 17, 7192; doi:10.3390/ijerph17197192 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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