Construção e validação de uma escala de avaliação de conforto da pessoa idosa em situação de cronicidade e hospitalização

Abstract

Introdution: Increased longevity, the growing demand of older people to health services and the increasing number of elderly people living with chronic illness makes us reflect on importance of providing nursing care that respond to the real needs of the elderly in hospital context. The Comfort is one of the needs of the elderly hospitalized with chronic disease (Sousa, 2014) and the lack of an instrument to measure this level, was the main motivation for the development of this study. Starting from the comfort needs encountered by Sousa (2014), has set itself the objective of this study provide an assessment instrument Comfort of the elderly hospitalized with chronic illness; build a tool to measure the comfort level of this patients; identify the sociodemographic and health characteristics of the sample under study; validate a tool to measure the comfort level of the elderly hospitalized with chronic disease and meet the comfort level of the sample under study. Methodology: There has been conducted a methodological research study (Polit & Hungler, 2004). Results: The instrument was validated with a sample of 240 older people with chronic illness hospitalized with an average age 78.41 years (Std = 8,363). After the factor analysis the instrument was left with 22 items distributed in four factors (psycho-spiritual, physical, social and environmental) with an explained variance of 45.409%. The Cronbach α coefficient calculated (0.819) allowed us to state that the instrument has good internal consistency. Bearing in mind that the values may range between 1 and 5, noted that the elderly hospitalized with chronic disease have a good average comfort (M = 3,11 and Std = 0,18). Conclusions: The instrument is valid and psychometrically appropriate, however it is suggested the application of the scale to a larger sample in several hospital services.

Date of Award	6 Jun 2016
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Patrícia Pontífice-Sousa (Supervisor) & Rita Marques (Co-Supervisor)