• Sarah Campos, Liying Zhang, Emily Sinclair, May Tsao, Elizabeth A Barnes, Cyril Danjoux, Arjun Sahgal, Philiz Goh, Shaelyn Culleton, Gunita Mitera, and Edward Chow.
• Rapid Response Radiotherapy Program, Department of Radiation Oncology, Odette Cancer Center, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, 2075 Bayview Avenue, Toronto, ON M4N 3M5, Canada.
• Support Care Cancer. 2009 Jun 1;17(6):685-90.

IntroductionThe Palliative Performance Scale (PPS) was developed by the Victoria Hospice Society in 1996 to modernize the Karnofsky Performance Scale. Currently, it is being used to measure palliative patient performance status in a variety of settings. Despite its widespread use, only one study has examined the inter-rater reliability of the PPS.PurposeTo examine the inter-rater reliability of the PPS in measuring performance status in patients seen in an outpatient palliative radiation oncology clinicMethodsPerformance status for 102 consecutive patients was assessed by an oncologist (MD), a radiation therapist (RT), and a research assistant (RA) in the Rapid Response Radiotherapy Program at the Odette Cancer Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Raters' scores were analyzed for correlation and compared to evaluate the inter-rater reliability of the PPS tool.ResultsExcellent correlation was found between the scores rated by the MD and RA (r = 0.86); good correlation was observed between scores rated by the MD and RT (r = 0.69) and the RT and RA (r = 0.77). Scores between all three raters, as well as between rater pairs, were also found to have good reliability as measured by the Chronbach's alpha coefficient. Significant results were obtained for the range of PPS scores in which the majority of our patients fell: 40-80%.ConclusionPPS was shown to have good overall inter-rater reliability in an outpatient palliative setting, but more research is needed to establish the validity and reliability of the tool in a variety of different palliative settings.

18 keywords...

hide…