Cancer patient assessment and reports of excellence: reliability and validity of advanced cancer patient perceptions of the quality of care.

PURPOSE: Consumer perceptions are important measures of the quality of cancer care. This article describes the validation of new measures of the quality of cancer care at the time of diagnosis and treatment for advanced cancer with life-limiting prognosis.
METHODS: Focus groups, review of guidelines, and an expert panel were used to construct two surveys of the quality of cancer care. A prospective cohort study examined the reliability and validity of three problem scores (ie, counts of the opportunities to improve the quality of care) that examine care at the time of diagnosis and initial treatment.
RESULTS: At the first interview, 58% of 206 cancer patients (54.9% females; 27.5% with lung cancer; 5.4% with pancreatic cancer; 30.4% with colorectal cancer; 18.6% with breast cancer; mean age, 66.6 years) identified one or more concerns with communication about being diagnosed with advanced cancer. At the second interview, 57.0% of the respondents voiced one or more concerns about treatment communication, and 30.2% expressed one or more concerns about the experience of treatment. Each of the problem scores demonstrated both internal consistency with Cronbach's alpha > .75 and short-term stability of responses in a subsample that had the survey administered twice in 72 hours. Factor analysis largely confirmed the proposed scale structure. All three measures demonstrated moderate correlations suggesting evidence of construct validity.
CONCLUSION: The three proposed problem scores demonstrate evidence of reliability and validity that warrants further testing to examine their responsiveness and discriminate validity in larger, more generalizable samples.