Validation of a Questionnaire for Assessing Patients’ Awareness and Readiness to Undergo Screening for Cardiovascular Diseases and Mental Disorders at a Family Doctor’s Appointment

Cardiovascular diseases are the leaders among the most common causes of death in Europe today. Ukraine belongs to the countries with a very high cardiovascular risk. The problem of Ukrainian medicine is mistrust of the medical system, untimely referral to a doctor, delayed diagnosis and the start of treatment. The objective: to analyze the validation of a questionnaire to assess the awareness and readiness of patients to undergo screening for cardiovascular diseases and mental disorders at a family doctor’s appointment in Ukraine. Materials and methods. To assess the validity, 50 patients completed the questionnaire at a family doctor’s visit. The age of the patients was 18 years and older. Patients were randomly selected. To assess external validity, 30 patients indicated the importance of each questionnaire item on a 5-point scale. To assess the content validity, a group of 10 expert practicing family doctors was asked to rate on a 3-point scale how relevant each of the items in the questionnaire is for the study, and also to rate on a 4-point scale how much each of the items corresponds to the purpose of the study and is understandable for the respondent. To assess the stability of the results of the questionnaire, 30 patients passed it again after 2 weeks. Internal consistency of items was assessed using Cronbach’s alpha method. Results. The assessment of the importance of items was found to be sufficient for all items. During content validity assessment, CVR≥0.62, CVI>0.79 were acceptable. Internal consistency was assessed using Cronbach’s alpha method. To be acceptable, the internal consistency should be above 0.7 (the internal consistency of the questionnaire was 0.85). Test-retest stability or reliability was assessed using weighted kappa for ordinal variables and Cohen’s kappa for nominal variables. Stability was considered sufficient when the results of weighted Kappa and Cohen’s Kappa were above 0.61. All questionnaire questions demonstrated acceptable test-retest stability. Conclusions. The questionnaire “Assessment of awareness and readiness of patients to undergo screening for cardiovascular diseases and mental disorders at a family doctor’s appointment” is sufficiently relevant, understandable, reliable and can be used to assess awareness and readiness of patients to undergo screening for cardiovascular diseases and mental disorders at a family doctor’s appointment in Ukraine.