Development and evaluation of the short version of the Patient Assessment of Chronic Illness Care instrument.

OBJECTIVES

The Patient Assessment of Chronic Illness Care (PACIC) was developed for measuring the extent to which patients receive care congruent with the chronic care model (CCM). The purpose of this study was to develop a short version of the PACIC with better psychometric properties than the original instrument.

METHODS

Two samples of 529 and 361 type 2 diabetic patients completed a modified PACIC. A short-version PACIC instrument was developed and validated using parallel analysis to determine the number of factors, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) within an exploratory factor analysis framework (E/CFA) was conducted to explore the measurement structure of the full instrument, and a CFA was performed to confirm the hypothesized structure.

RESULTS

The results demonstrated that the PACIC is unidimensional and that it can be reduced to 11 items with no loss in psychometric properties. No demographic variables or clinical assays were found to be related to the PACIC.

DISCUSSION

A short-version PACIC is now available and ready for use in research with diabetic patients. Its use is encouraged in future research, particularly in the exploration of its validity against actual CCM services delivered and long-term clinical outcomes.