Compassionate care among oncology patients at Tikur Anbssa Specialized Hospital: tool validation and measurement of practice in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2018-11
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Addis Ababa Universty
Abstract
Background: Compassionate care is a hallmark of quality health care in any health system.
However, this issue only has got attention very recently in the Ethiopian context. In addition,
there is no locally applicable measurement tool to assess the compassionate care practice in
the Ethiopian context.
Objectives: The objective of this study was to assess the validity of the Schwartz Center
Compassionate Care Scale and to measure compassionate care practice among oncology
patients at Tikur Anbessa Specialized Hospital.
Methods: An institutional based cross-sectional study supplemented by qualitative approach
was conducted from March- May 2018. A total of 423 oncology patients were selected using
a systematic random sampling technique. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize
socio-demographic and clinical characteristic of the study participants. Construct validity and
reliability analyses were conducted to determine the psychometric property of the tool and
then compassionate care practice was measured. The analysis was done by statistical package
for social science version 23.0, Amos version 23 and Open code version 4.02.
Results: Two hundred seventy five (66.4%) of the participants were females. The mean age
of the participants was 47 and breast cancer was the leading cause of facility visit 122
(29.5%). The Schwartz Center Compassionate Care Scale is a two factor structure with a
good model fit and has high scale reliability of 0.88 and 0.83, 0.84 subscale reliability
respectively. The overall compassionate care practice was found to be 45.7% and high
patients’ flow, bed shortage and being treated by different physicians were among the factors
that identified to be a barrier for compassionate care practicing.
Conclusion and recommendations: The Schwartz Center Compassionate Care Scale can be
applied to measure compassionate care practice in the Ethiopian context and the practice is
found to be low. Actions should be taken to improve the compassionate care practice.
Description
Keywords
Compassionate care,Construct validity and reliability analyses