Propriedades psicométricas da Escala de Autoeficácia em Cuidados Paliativos (SEPC-BR) entre profissionais da saúde

Abstract

Introduction: The demographic and epidemiological transition of recent years has brought the need to adapt the health system to new demands, and palliative care (PC) is an alternative for treating patients affected by life-threatening illnesses in their entirety, aiming at their quality of life through the prevention and relief of suffering. One of the barriers to establishing palliative care is the lack of specific education, according to specialized bodies. Measures that explore aspects such as competence and knowledge in CP are essential to propose training strategies in the area, allowing professional self-assessment of their skills. The Brazilian self-efficacy scale in palliative care (SEPC-BR) seeks to assess students' self-efficacy and their perspective related to the practice of PC, being translated and validated into Brazilian Portuguese in 2020 with medical students. The interest of this study was to explore its psychometric properties so that it can be extended to the multidisciplinary team, given that PC has an interprofessional approach among its premises.

Objectives: to analyze the psychometric properties of the Palliative Care Self-Efficacy Scale, the Brazilian version, among health professionals; evaluate the validity of the SEPC-Br convergent construct by correlating with the results obtained by the Palliative Care Health Professionals Educational Needs Scale (ESPC-Br); evaluate construct validity by confirmatory factor analysis; evaluate the reliability of the SEPC-Br by checking internal consistency using Cronbach's alpha.

Method: Methodological study, carried out non-face-to-face in a virtual environment, with 167 health professionals from different areas. Three forms were applied, one for characterizing the participants, the SEPC-Br, and the ESPC-Br. The data were organized in Excel and processed by SPSS statistical software. Descriptive statistics, reliability analysis using Cronbach's alpha, and convergent construct validity using Spearman's correlation analysis were performed between the measurements obtained by SEPC-Br and ESPC-Br.

Results: 181 responses were obtained on the form, 167 of which were valid for analysis. The majority (90.4%) of participants declared themselves trained in nursing, their ages ranged from 18 to 65 years old, with an average of 41.4 years old. 88% declared that they did not have specific training in CP. The mean SEPC-Br scale score was 1374.30 and the standard deviation was 612.84; for EPCS-Br the average was 72.2 and the standard deviation was 23.7. The total Cronbach's Alpha for SEPC-Br was 0.97. The convergent validity of the SEEPC-Br confirmed the hypothesis in the study, that the SEPC-Br and EPCS-Br measures were correlated from moderate to strong intensity, and the correlation coefficients between the scales ranged from 0.640 to 0.419 (p<0.001).

Conclusion: The SEPC-BR presented high reliability and construct validity results among the health professionals investigated in this study, proving to be suitable for application with the multidisciplinary team.