Development And Psychometric Testing Of The Specific Supportive Care Needs Scale For Patients With Gynecologic Cancer

Objective 1.Exploring the contents of specific supportive care needs of patients with gynecological cancer;2.Developing a specific supportive care needs scale for patients with gynecological cancer(short for SSCNS-G)and testing its psychometric properties.Methods The part 1was a qualitative interview.We recruited 9 health care providers and24 patients with gynecological cancer to take part in our semi-structural personal in-depth interviews by purposive sampling.And the themes and Sub-themes were extracted by using content analysis method.The part 2 was to develop the scale and test its psychometric properties.The item pool was constructed by referring to the results of qualitative interview and items of previous relevant scales.After two rounds of content validity assessment by inviting6 experts,the items were merged,deleted or modified.Then we conducted a pilot study by inviting 15 patients to form the primary version of the scale.The primary version of the scale was applied in 280 patients with gynecological cancer,the clinical version of the scale was formed after the item analysis and reliability and validity test.Results Part 1: The specific supportive care needs of patients with gynecological cancer were explored from the health care providers' and patients' view respectively,enriching the contents of specific supportive care needs of patients with gynecological cancer.1.From the health care providers' view,the specific supportive care needs of patients with gynecological cancer included 4 aspects: specific symptom management needs,spousal relationship consolidation needs,self-esteem maintaining needs and reproductive needs.2.From the patients' view,their specific supportive care needs included 3 aspects:specific symptom management needs,spousal relationship consolidation needs and self-esteem maintaining needs.Part 2:(1)The 78-item initial item pool was formed by combining the qualitative interview results and the relevant items of the previous scales.After discussion in the research group,a 29-item alternative item pool was formed.And then5 items were modified based on the result of expert content validity evaluation and pilot study.(2)280 gynecological cancer patients were evaluated using the initial version of the scale,4 items were deleted after item analysis.(3)Testing the reliability and validity of 25-item primary version of the scale,reliability analysis showed that the Cronbach's? coefficient was 0.951,and the split-half reliability coefficient was 0.810.Convergent validity analysis showed that the total score of SSCNS-G was positively related with the functional assessment cancer therapy-generic scale in the total score and scores of different dimensions(r=0.147~0.791,P<0.05),and negatively related with the hospital anxiety and depression scale in the total score and scores of different dimensions(r=-0.490~-0.142,P<0.05).Discrimination validity analysis showed that there were significant differences in need level among patients with different cancer types,different age and different menopausal status at diagnosis stage(P<0.05).Conclusion This study preliminary investigated the contents of the specific supportive care needs of the patients with gynecological cancer and developed a scale to measure the needs.The scale had a good reliability and validity,which can be used to measure the specific supportive care needs of patients with gynecologic cancer.