Development of a Scale to Evaluate the Depressive State among Elderly Patients in General Wards

Abstract

This study aims to develop a scale to evaluate depressive states among elderly patients in general wards, and verify the reliability and validity of the scale. Based on the results of interviews with nurses, we developed a draft of a scale comprised of 48 questions (NDE48). The Geriatric Depression Scale short version (GDS15), and the Zung Self-rating Depression Scale (SDS) were administered to 54 elderly patients. Two groups of nurses completed the NDE48 on different days. After performing an explanatory factor analysis, the NDE48 was simplified to a 16 question item scale (NDE16), comprising three factors. The correlation coefficient between GDS15 and NDE16 was 0.41 (p = 0.00191), and between SDS and NDE16 was 0.30 (p = 0.02633). Alpha coefficient of the total score of NDE16 was 0.88. For inter-rater reliability, the correlation coefficient was 0.57 (p = 0.00005). The findings suggest that the NDE16 will be highly useful when nurses evaluate depressive states among elderly inpatients.

Development of a Scale to Evaluate Depressive States among Elderly Patients in General Wards —Verification of the Contents to Improve the Accuracy of the Scale

“…This suggests that the consensus rate increased as the survey proceeded to the next round. Since the present study uses questions carefully selected by factor analysis (Table 5) from the previous study [4], the results of the present study may be concluded to have met the criteria for validity in a Delphi method survey. The NDE16 includes three factors resulting from the factor analysis (Table 5): "a state with difficulty in suppressing emotion", "expressing thought suppression", and "expressing a state of lack of control".…”

“…This makes it important to be able to make early detection of depressive states without burdening elderly inpatients. For this reason, this study developed a Nurse Administered Depression Scale for Elderly Inpatients 16 (NDE16), which consists of 16 question items in 3 overarching factors and can be scored by nurses through observations [4]. The feature of NDE16 that makes it useful is that it is simple and provides a measure to establish the existence of depressive states without unduly burdening the elderly inpatients being evaluated.…”