Psychometric Testing of the Revised Self-Care of Heart Failure Index.
Barbara Riegel, Claudio Barbaranelli, Beverly Carlson and 8 others
PMID 30303894WHAT IT FOUND
The revised heart failure self-care questionnaire appears usable.
It sorts patient behaviors into maintenance, symptom perception, and management, and higher maintenance or symptom perception scores relate to better quality of life.
Key findings
01The items grouped into three scales, each with two dimensions, and the combined model fit the data well.
02When the questionnaire was repeated after 2 weeks, correlations were 0.89 for maintenance, 0.70 for symptom perception, and 0.84 for management.
03Higher maintenance and symptom perception scores were linked to better general and mental health, and symptom perception was linked to better physical health, but management scores were not linked to health-related quality of life.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
Participants were recruited by convenience sampling, not a random population sample. The stability and quality-of-life checks used small subsamples from single sites, with 50 people for test-retest and 89 people for the quality-of-life analysis. For the quality-of-life analysis, the authors treated P less than .10 as significant because the subsample was small. Self-care was measured by patient report, so scores reflect perceived self-care, not observed behavior. People with dementia or listed for heart transplant were excluded, and participants had to read and write English. The sample was mostly male, white, non-Hispanic, and married, and participants had heart failure for more than 10 years on average. The paper says the adequacy cut-off and minimal clinically relevant change are based on the earlier version.
Declared interests
The funding declaration reports NIH grants: Barbara Riegel was funded through R01 NR018196, and Marguerite Daus was funded through T32 NR007104.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that using this questionnaire has been shown to improve patient care. The study tested how well it measures self-care and whether scores relate to quality of life, but it did not test whether nurses or other clinicians use it to change education or outcomes.