Development and psychometric properties of a self report measure to assess clinicians' practices in self management support for patients with long term conditions

Objective

This paper presents a process of developing practices in self management support (PSMS) - a measure assessing clinicians’ self reported use of self management support practices in clinical consultations for patients with long term conditions (LTCs).

Methods

The development process comprised the following steps: literature review to define what skills clinicians need to effectively support patients to self manage, review of existing measures of SMS practices, construction of an initial pool of items, E Delphi study pilot survey to select items for final measure, data collection to confirm the factor structure and internal consistency of the final measure.

Results

The PSMS comprises three subscales: Clinical SMS (14 items), Patient Centeredness (4 items) and Organizational SMS (7 items). All subscales have very good internal reliability (Cronbach α: 0.94, 0.78 and 0.85; all item-total correlations above 0.50).

Conclusions and practice implications

We believe PSMS measure is suitable for both research and programme evaluation in UK clinical settings. To complete the process of measure development we are now planning to conduct further analyses to establish the validity of PSMS measure in UK and non UK healthcare settings and test the validity of PSMS measure on a wider range of other LTC groups.