Systematic development and adjustment of the German version of the Supportive and Palliative Care Indicators Tool (SPICT-DE)

Abstract

BackgroundThe Supportive and Palliative Care Indicators tool (SPICT) supports the identification of patients with potential palliative care (PC) needs. An Austrian-German expert group translated SPICT into German (SPICT-DE) in 2014. The aim of this study was the systematic development, refinement, and testing of SPICT-DE for its application in primary care (general practice).MethodsSPICT-DE was developed by a multiprofessional research team according to the TRAPD model: translation, review, adjudication, pretesting and documentation. In a pretest, five general practitioners (GPs) rated four case vignettes of patients with different PC needs. GPs were asked to assess whether each patient might benefit from PC or not (I) based on their subjective appraisal (“usual practice”) and (II) by using SPICT-DE. After further refinement, two focus groups with 28 GPs (68% with a further qualification in PC) were conducted to test SPICT-DE. Again, participants rated two selected case vignettes (I) based on their subjective appraisal and (II) by using SPICT-DE. Afterwards, participants reflected the suitability of SPICT-DE for use in their daily practice routine within the German primary care system. Quantitative data were analysed with descriptive statistics and non-parametric tests for small samples. Qualitative data were analysed by conventional content analysis. Focus group discussion was analysed combining formal and conventional content analysis.ResultsCompared to the spontaneous rating of the case vignettes based on subjective appraisal, participants in both the pretest and the focus groups considered PC more often as being beneficial for the patients described in the case vignettes when using SPICT-DE. Participants in the focus groups agreed that SPICT-DE includes all relevant indicators necessary for an adequate clinical identification of patients who might benefit from PC.ConclusionsSPICT-DE supports the identification of patients who might benefit from PC and seems suitable for routine application in general practice in Germany. The systematic development, refinement, and testing of SPICT-DE in this study was successfully completed by using a multiprofessional and participatory approach.

Early integration of palliative care: translation, cross‐cultural adaptation and content validity of the Supportive and Palliative Care Indicators Tool in a Swedish healthcare context

“…The SPICT was chosen due to it is the only tool which is evidential of its ability to identify patients with palliative care needs early (6). Furthermore, the SPICT can be used in both inpatient and outpatient care (3).The SPICT is easily available through a web-based platform, is not restricted to specific diseases and has been translated and validated in different countries and healthcare settings in Europe (9)(10)(11). This study describes the process of translation, cross-cultural adaptation and content validation of the SPICT-SE.…”

Identification of patients with potential palliative care needs: A systematic review of screening tools in primary care

“…20,29,31 These translated versions (in addition to the original English version) have been validated in a wide range of inpatient and outpatient clinical settings. 20,29,31,32,36 Various cutoff scores were used in different versions of SPICT (Table 3). Studies in Australia and Japan that used SPICT among old patients in primary care showed that between 5.1% and 17.3% of these patients could benefit from palliative care.…”

Palliative care needs-assessment and measurement tools used in patients with heart failure: a systematic mixed-studies review with narrative synthesis

“…IPOS and NAT:PD-HF contain more items than other tools and although they may take longer to complete, they provide a more comprehensive evaluation of patient needs. SPICT and NECPAL need less than 8 min to fill [72][73][74]. IPOS patient version takes about 8 min for completion while the staff version takes about 2 to 5 min [75].…”

“…In the general population, IPOS and SPICT have the best evidence of validity, reliability, and practicality [55,65,72,73,[78][79][80][81][82][83][84], followed by NECPAL and RADPAC [60,66], while no formal validation studies were found for GSF-PIG.…”