Development and Validation of the Therapy Preference Scale to Understand Patients´ Systemic Cancer Treatmentpreferences

Abstract

We incorporated questions related tosafety, effectiveness and other characteristics of systemic cancer treatment into a self-report questionnaire –the Therapy Preference Scale –that captures patients´ preferences.The authors asked 20 experts to assess content validity and an additional 20 experts, patients and community members to examine face validity and guide revisions. Key revisions included shortening the length, clarifying constructs and providing details to explain the context and trade-offs necessary to balance the risks and benefits of cancer treatment. The content validity index for the final questionnaire was 1.0, indicating that all questions were relevant. Reviewers expressed that the questionnaire would serve an important purpose. Experts, patients and community members guided revisions of the questionnaire and documented its value.

Lay abstract

Tools to capture patients´ preferences for various aspects of cancer treatment are currently sparse. The authors developed a self-report questionnaire –the Therapy Preference Scale –to understand preferences for safety, effectiveness and other characteristics of systemic cancer treatment. The authors asked 20 experts to assess the validity of its content and an additional 20 experts, patients and community members to examine face validity and guide the revisions of the questionnaire. Key revisions included shortening the length, clarifying questions and providing details to explain the context and trade-offs necessary to balance the risks and benefits of cancer treatment. The final questionnaire included questions that were all considered relevant. Reviewers expressed that the questionnaire would serve an important purpose to understand what matters most to an individual patient with cancer.

Keywords::

• cancer
• neoplasm
• oncology
• patient preference
• therapeutics
• validation study

Supplementary data

To view the supplementary data that accompany this paper please visit the journal website at: www.tandfonline.com/doi/suppl/10.2217/fon-2020-0497

Disclaimer

An abstract containing preliminary results of this work was published online as a proceeding of the 2019 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

V Bhatt reports receiving consulting fees from Takeda, Omeros, Agios, Abbvie, Partner Therapeutics, Rigel, Incyte and Partnership for Health Analytic Research, LLC (funded by Jazz), research funding (institutional) from Jazz, Abbvie, Pfizer, Incyte, Tolero Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and the National Marrow Donor Program, and drug support for a trial from Oncoceutics. This work was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, 1 U54 GM115458, which funds the Great Plains IDeA-CTR Network. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.

Ethical conduct of research

The institutional review board at the University of Nebraska Medical Center deemed this study not to be human subject research, as subjects were only examining the instrument for validity and not providing individual responses to items. For this reason, only verbal consent was obtained from the reviewers.

Additional information

Funding

V Bhatt reports receiving consulting fees from Takeda, Omeros, Agios, Abbvie, Partner Therapeutics, Rigel, Incyte and Partnership for Health Analytic Research, LLC (funded by Jazz), research funding (institutional) from Jazz, Abbvie, Pfizer, Incyte, Tolero Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and the National Marrow Donor Program, and drug support for a trial from Oncoceutics. This work was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, 1 U54 GM115458, which funds the Great Plains IDeA-CTR Network. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.