IntroductionDetermining and managing the unfulfilled supportive care needs of the patients is among the base components of healthcare (1). Supportive care may be considered as the determination of the care needs of the patients with and patient-centered approach and fulfilling those needs effectively (2). Before and during diagnosis, throughout the treatment, in the terminal period, it is the supportive care that helps the patient and the family to cope with the illness (3).Breast cancer is the most common cancer type among Turkish women. Every one out of four women diagnosed with cancer has breast cancer. The number of the women diagnosed with breast cancer in one year is 17.531 in Turkey (4). It is vital to acknowledge the complete effects of the unfulfilled needs of breast cancer patient on their quality of life to take effective and timely action. Various studies have shown that the unfulfilled care needs of cancer patients occur mostly in the early stages of cancer survival and that this has a negative effect on life quality of patients (5-7).Besides, various other studies put forward that supportive care is associated with longer survival and better life quality (7)(8)(9). In this respect, it is necessary to determine the supportive care needs of breast cancer patients and improve their quality of life. Patients have a multitude of care need dimensions; these dimensions include physical, practical-daily life activities, economic, environmental, cultural, knowledge, communication, emotional, psychosocial, psychosexual, spiritual-existential areas (10). Identifying unfulfilled needs will enable the improvement of the resources of cancer patients and the re-planning of the care (3). Recently, an interest in formal and systematical identification of care Eur J Breast Health 2017; 13: 183-8 DOI: 10.5152/tjbh.2017.3266 183 ABSTRACT Objective: In the study, Adaptation of The Short-Form Supportive Care Needs Survey Questionnaire (SCNS-SF 34) into Turkish, examination of its validity and reliability was aimed at.
Materials and Methods:The study was carried out between May and July, 2016 with 170 patients. The socio-demographic and clinical status was analyzed by means of number averages and standard deviation. After language validity, the content validity index was calculated. The split-scale analyses, which are reliability internal consistency tests, were performed with the Cronbach α coefficient and total item correlation. For structure validity, exploratory factor analysis was used.
Results:The average age of the patients is 55.53±11.43 years and average time since diagnosis is 5.69±5.06 years. The content validity index of the scale was calculated as 0.83. The Cronbach α coefficient is 0.93. In terms of the item total score correlation, all correlation coefficients except items 18 and 19 were between 0.36 and 0.81 and p<0.001. Items 18 and 19 were excluded. Following the exploratory factor analysis, items 13, 17 and 32 were excluded as their two detected high weight values were below 0.10. The descriptive ...