Developing and piloting a communication assessment tool assessing patient perspectives on communication with pharmacists (CAT-Pharm)

Abstract

Background Effective communication strategies in health care help to enhance patient empowerment and improve clinical outcomes. Objective Adapt the original Communication Assessment (CAT) instrument for the pharmacist profession (CAT-Pharm) and to test its validity and reliability in two different settings. Setting Five hospital pharmacies in Italy and five community pharmacies in Malta. Method Pilot study involving a standardized multi-step process adhering to internationally accepted and recommended guidelines. Corrections and adjustments to the translation addressed linguistic factors and cultural components. CAT-Pharm, compared to the original CAT, maintained 10 out of the 14 items: one was slightly modified; three were changed to better fit the pharmacist role; one was added. Main outcome measure CAT-Pharm development and testing its practicality to Assess patient perceptions of pharmacists’ interpersonal and communication skills. Results CAT-Pharm was tested on 97 patients in the Italian setting and 150 patients in the Maltese setting to assess the practicality of the tool and its usefulness in investigating gaps and priorities for improving pharmacist-patient communication. Results Show reliability and internal validity of the CAT-Pharm tool. The analysis of patient perceptions of communication with the pharmacist in Italy indicated differences from that in Malta. The different settings provided insight into the utility of CAT-Pharm. Conclusion This study provided a valid and reliable tool that could be applied to assess patient perception of the pharmacist's communication abilities.

Effects of a multicomponent communication training to involve older people in decisions to DEPRESCRIBE cardiometabolic medication in primary care (CO-DEPRESCRIBE): protocol for a cluster randomized controlled trial with embedded process and economic evaluation

“… patient-reported involvement in the decision making process, using the Shared Decision Making Questionnaire (SDM-Q-9) [ 43 ]. patient-reported views on HCP communication skills, using the Communication Assessment Tool for Pharmacists (CAT-Pharm) [ 44 ]. patient-reported experience regarding the CMR focused on deprescribing cardiometabolic medication, based on the patient-reported experience measure (PREM) used in our previous study on deprescribing cardiometabolic medication in patients with type 2 diabetes with a high hypoglycemia [ 26 ].…”

“…patient-reported views on HCP communication skills, using the Communication Assessment Tool for Pharmacists (CAT-Pharm) [ 44 ].…”