Development and Validation of a Health Needs Assessment Scale for Primary Liver Cancer Patients Receiving Surgical Management

Cancer survivors usually have varying degrees of physical and psychosocial issues and poor quality of life. Understanding the health needs from a patient's view is necessary for developing targeted supportive services. There is neither research on the postoperative health needs of primary liver cancer (PLC) patients, nor the assessment tools specifically designed for PLC patients. The purpose of this study was to develop a postoperative health needs assessment scale for PLC patients receiving surgical management. This was a methodological instrument validation study conducted in the first affiliated of Jinan University between August 2018 and December 2019. PLC patients receiving surgical management were selected by convenient sampling methods. Ten patients were selected for semi-structured in-depth interviews to generate a 50-item initial scale. After two rounds of expert consultation, a 44-item initial scale was used for a 20-respondent small sample pre-test. The pre-survey scale was distributed to 250 patients. Structural validity was examined with factor analysis, and reliability was evaluated with the Cronbach alpha and split-half reliability. Among the 250 respondents of the pre-survey scale, 232 cases completed the questionnaire. After item analysis and factor analysis, 38 items were kept in the final scale. The content validity index for the whole scale (S-CVI) and each item (I-CVI) was 0.90 and 0.80-0.90, respectively. The total Cronbach alpha value was 0.935, and the split-half reliability was 0.931. The healthy needs assessment scale for PLC patients receiving surgical management has good reliability and validity.