• J Pain Symptom Manage · Jul 2001

    Family reports of dying patients' distress: the adaptation of a research tool to assess global symptom distress in the last week of life.

    • S E Hickman, V P Tilden, and S W Tolle.
    • Center for Ethics in Health Care, School of Medicine, Oregon Health Sciences University, Portland, OR 97201-3098, USA.
    • J Pain Symptom Manage. 2001 Jul 1; 22 (1): 565-74.

    AbstractUnderstanding dying patients' symptom distress is an important component of efforts to improve care at the end of life. It can, however, be problematic to conduct research with dying patients. Family members can serve as sources of information about decedents' last days of life. In order to assess family reports of decedents' global symptom distress in the last week of life, we adapted the Memorial Symptom Assessment Scale Global Distress Index (MSAS-GDI), a brief measure of patient global symptom distress, for use in a retrospective study of family reports about end-of-life care. It was administered to a sample of 103 family members to assess the psychometric properties of the instrument in bereaved family members. The Family MSAS-GDI consists of questions about 11 psychological and physical symptoms commonly experienced by dying patients. The majority of family members were able to respond to the scale items. The mean Family MSAS-GDI score was 1.14 (SD = 0.87) with a range of 0 to 3.73. The scale demonstrated good internal consistency (alpha = 0.82). The average item-total correlation was r = 0.49 and the average inter-item correlation was r= 0.30, suggesting items were moderately correlated with the overall total scale and with each other. The Family MSAS-GDI could prove to be a useful tool in assessing and tracking global symptom distress in dying patients.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…

Want more great medical articles?

Keep up to date with a free trial of metajournal, personalized for your practice.
1,704,841 articles already indexed!

We guarantee your privacy. Your email address will not be shared.