Validation of the Patient Reported Outcome Measure of Spiritual Care (PROM) in an Australian Setting

A multi-site study across five hospitals in Australia, undertaken as part of the study to evaluate the validity and reliability of the Patient Reported Outcome Measure of spiritual care (PROM) scale. Two hundred and eighty-one patients participated in the study. Data were analysed using AMOS (version 24) to assess the validity and reliability of the PROM using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Predictive (criterion) validity of the scale was also assessed by evaluating the relationship of the PROM scale with the quality of spiritual care. The results demonstrated acceptable validity, model-based reliability and predicative validity for the PROM scale. It is recommended that a further study for cross-validation of the scale in different samples and populations is undertaken. Controlling for other variables such as (positive-negative affect or personality characteristics) for future studies might shed more light on the content validity of  the PROM. The study has implications for the longer-term goal of building an evidence base for a spiritual care framework for Australian healthcare organizations and beyond.  It is hoped that the data collected will enable spiritual health organizations to contrib- ute to a larger database of evidence, both nationally and internationally.