Reliability and validity of the Readiness for Hospital Discharge Scale in patients with spinal cord injury.
Jacques S De Lange, Jolandi Jacobs, Nadine Meiring and 4 others
PMID 32537524WHAT IT FOUND
For South African adults leaving spinal cord injury rehabilitation, a 21-item questionnaire about discharge readiness gave consistent scores and mostly reflected patients' own readiness.
It did not meet every item-level standard.
Key findings
01The overall RHDS score had a Cronbach's alpha of 0.904 in the 50 participants.
02Seventeen of the 21 RHDS items correlated above 0.40 with their own domain score.
03Thirteen of the 21 RHDS items correlated more strongly with their own domain than with other domains.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
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What it does not show
The study included only 50 South African adults with spinal cord injury from three public and two private units in the Tshwane metropolitan area, so the results may not apply to other settings or populations. The sample was recruited by convenience, and the authors said a larger sample size would have been preferable. The design was cross-sectional, so the study could not establish predictive validity or test-retest reliability. Inter-rater reliability could not be checked because only one assessor rated each patient. Only 17 of the 21 items met the convergent validity criterion, and only 13 of the 21 items met the divergent validity criterion. The study tested patients near discharge, so it says little about readiness at other points in rehabilitation.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the RHDS as a tested discharge decision tool. This paper checked the questionnaire's scores in South African adults with spinal cord injury, and it did not show that using the scale improves discharge timing or prevents complications.