Fostering compassionate care in long-term care settings

Abstract

Compassion is recognized as a catalyst for quality in healthcare. While the empirical study of compassion in healthcare has been facilitated by the emergence of the Sinclair Compassion Questionnaire (SCQ), its patient-reported design precludes its use among patients whose conditions prevent them from answering questions about the care they receive. This presents a particular barrier to compassion research in long-term care settings, where the prevalence of cognitive impairment is high, and increasing (Ng et al., 2020). Informal care-partners may be the sole source of information about compassionate care in these settings, but no tool is currently available to measure this construct from that perspective. To address this gap, this research sought to validate a new version of the Sinclair Compassion Questionnaire (SCQ-CP) which has been semantically adapted for use with care-partners. In the first phase of the study, the SCQ-CP was administered to a pilot sample of care-partners using Collin’s pre-testing framework (2003) to verify that the tool is comprehensible, acceptable, and user-friendly. In the second phase of the study, samples of individual care-partners and care-partner/resident dyads were recruited. Care-partners completed two questionnaire batteries, separated by a delay of 30 days. The first battery consisted of the SCQ-CP and the Canadian Health Care Evaluation Project (CANHELP) Lite Long-Term Care Questionnaire; the second, the SCQ-CP alone. Residents completed a single questionnaire battery consisting of the original SCQ. Statistical analyses evaluated internal consistency, convergent validity, SCQ/SCQ-CP congruence, and test-retest reproducibility. Results provided initial support for the use of the SCQ-CP as a psychometrically-sound measure of compassionate care in long-term care settings, thereby enabling further research on compassionate care in a setting that was previously out of reach.