Development and Psychometrics of “Treatment Cost Management Scale” for Children with Cancer

Measuring the cost of treatment is one of the daily concerns of the developed world, which play a fundamental role in the design and evaluation of health systems. The present study was conducted with the aim of development and psychometrics of "Treatment Cost Management Scale" for children with cancer.

The current research is of a methodological type. In the qualitative part, a wide review of the literature related to the research subject, including library documents and scientific articles from 2003 to 2021, was conducted and by analyzing them in the form of a data extraction form, "Treatment Cost Management Scale" was developed. In the quantitative part, the content validity ratio and the content validity index of the scale were conducted by asking the opinions of 15 people from the medical staff of Shafizadeh Children's Hospital in Babol city with the snowball method. Construct validity was investigated by exploratory factor analysis, convergent validity and divergent validity by distributing the designed scale among 250 available medical staff of Shafizadeh Children's Hospital. Composite reliability and internal consistency reliability were calculated by calculating Cronbach's alpha coefficient. The data were analyzed in SPSS. 22 and Amos. 24.

In the qualitative part, "Treatment Cost Management Scale" was developed with 24 items. The values of the content validity ratio for all items were 0.49 and the content validity index was 0.80. Exploratory factor analysis showed the construct validity of 6 subscales. Divergent validity was equal to 0.58 and composite reliability was equal to 0.89 and reliability by internal consistency method was obtained by calculating Cronbach's alpha coefficient equal to 0.88.

"Treatment Cost Management Scale" is valid and reliable with 24 items and 6 subscales. It is suggested to use the designed scale in researches related to health and treatment services to manage the costs of children with cancer.