Cancer and associated treatment can have a significant and detrimental impact on a person’s sexual wellbeing. Sexual attitudes and beliefs of healthcare professionals (HPs) working in cancer care settings can affect the support provided to help patients and partners to manage these concerns. This study evaluated psychometric properties of the Sexual Attitudes and Beliefs Scale (SABS-C8) adapted for use in cancer care settings.
Adaptation of original SABS was informed by evidence reviews and an expert panel of researchers. The 12-item SABS was completed by HPs working in cancer care (n = 391) prior to completing an eLearning intervention aimed at promoting provision of sexual support to patients and partners. Exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were conducted, reliability and validity of the scale were also explored.
EFA showed potential for a three-factor model, with CFA indicating a better model fit (CMIN/DF < 3; GFI > .9; CFI > .9 and < RMSEA < .08) for 8 of the SABS-C items, lending support for a unidimensional model, with moderately acceptable reliability of.69. The 8-item scale was also able to discriminate between known groups with lower attitudinal barriers to providing sexual support apparent in HPs with over 12 years of experience, in nurses compared with other HPs, and in those with previous sexual wellbeing education (p < 0.001).
The SABS-C8 is a brief scale with acceptable reliability that can be used to assess attitudinal barriers to sexual support and help to identify HPs learning needs around providing sexual support in cancer care.
Present studies report a vast number of unmet rehabilitation needs for cancer patients and a lack of professional focus irrespective of the type of cancer, prognosis, treatment, and clinical setting. Therefore, interventions targeting individual needs assessments using patient-reported outcome measures are recommended.
This paper explores the perceived value of a primarily author-developed questionnaire that assesses the needs experienced by cancer patients and general practitioners in their interaction in general practice.
We conducted nine semi-structured qualitative interviews with nine general practitioners and nine cancer patients to evaluate their assessment of our 33-item questionnaire.
The general practitioners and patients demonstrate similarities but differences in their perception of the questionnaire’s value. The general practitioners were anxious about the questionnaire's comprehensiveness, which could indicate to the patients that they should solve all their problems related to the aftermaths of their illness. This is why the alignment of expectations was essential to the general practitioners. The comprehensiveness was, however, also regarded as instructive to the general practitioners, given that they would get more knowledge about the patient’s conditions and problems. The patients saw the questionnaire as a helpful tool that could aid them in their illness, by targeting highly relevant areas that were not always addressed by their general practitioner. The comprehensiveness was thus regarded as helpful. They hoped the general practitioners would allocate enough time to go through all their needs, provided the general practitioners received the filled-in questionnaire before the consultations.
The GPs and patients favored the comprehensiveness of an author-developed structured questionnaire. Both groups agreed that it addressed all issues relevant to the patients during their illness. Although the GPs stressed that expectations should be aligned before introducing the questionnaire to the patients at consultations.
Chemotherapy-induced alopecia (CIA) is one of the most common and distressing side effects related to cancer treatment. Few patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) have been developed specifically to measure the patient-experience of hair loss during chemotherapy treatment. In part I of this research, a set of provisional questionnaire items were developed for a new tool. This article focusses on the validation and psychometric testing of the CIA-specific scoring items in the provisional HAIR-QoL measure.
The provisional HAIR-QoL questionnaire, comprised of 43 CIA-specific items, was administered to a large sample of patients (n = 228) from 8 international centres, who were undergoing chemotherapy. Psychometric testing used a combination of Classical Test Theory (CTT) and Item Response Theory methods; Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Rasch Analysis, respectively.
From the initial item pool of 43 items, 28 items satisfied the criteria for inclusion into four components. The four subscales identified were as follows, 1) Concern about change in appearance, 2) Image of self, 3) Preparedness for hair loss and 4) Impact of hair loss on you and others. The results of the quantitative analyses, PCA and Rasch analysis, suggested modest amendment to the number of items to the provisional HAIR-QoL measure. Psychometric properties were reported to be very good/excellent for all four subscales and were found to be sensitive to detecting group differences.
The refined items which comprise the final HAIR-QoL measure were found to tap into several important psycho-social domains of concern for patients who experienced CIA. The subscale scores have the potential to inform future decision-making on patients’ unmet information and support needs and pave the way for personalised psychological care and more robust research on efficacy of scalp cooling.