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A QUESTIONNAIRE ABOUT CANCER-RELATED FATIGUE FROM A ONCOLOGY PATIENT'S PERSPECTIVE Barcelona, Spain- The availability of well-developed and well-validated patient-centered health outcomes measures depends on factors as the target population/construct to be assessed and the original culture/language/ where de measure was developed, among others. The practice of adapting existing measures for use in other languages does not guarantee the inclusion of issues relevant to patients in the target population. This is the first study to create an instrument that measures cancer-related fatigue taking into account Spanish-speaking patient perspectives. Ahead of the results, the findings of this work contribute to answer two relevant questions. First, which of the approaches used up to know, to adapt existing measures or to developed new measures, are the most convenient? This is an increasingly important issue, especially for those researchers coming from non-english speaking cultures, for obvious reasons. According to this work, and from a pragmatic point of view, the answer depends hugely on the (real) use that researchers wants to give at a measure. Secondly, and as Elizabeth Juniper asked in 1997: which, if any, of the main approaches known for questionnaire development (clinimetric or psychometric) is more adequate? This study demonstrate that it could be a third approach, a combination of both, which would take advantage of the strenghs of both original approaches. Says Dr. Colomer, president of the Spanish Society of Medical Oncology (SEOM) “The availability of feasible tools for the assessment of cancer-related fatigue is a previous and necessary step for the quantification of improvement due to therapeutic interventions carried out with a supportive aim. This study was born under this prism, and was performed under the scientific auspices of the Spanish Society of Medical Oncology”. The new tool developed is presented and discussed in Volume 12, issue 1 of Value in Health (ISSN 1098-3015), the official journal of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research. Value in Health (ISSN 1098-3015) publishes papers, concepts, and ideas that advance the field of pharmacoeconomics and outcomes research and help health care leaders to make decisions that are solidly evidence-based. The journal is published bi-monthly and has a regular readership of over 4,000 clinicians, decision-makers, and researchers worldwide. ISPOR is a nonprofit, international organization that strives to translate pharmacoeconomics and outcomes research into practice to ensure that society allocates scarce health care resources wisely, fairly, and efficiently. For more information: |
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