Measuring compassionate healthcare with the 12-item Schwartz Center Compassionate Care Scale
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Patients and clinicians endorse the importance of compassionate healthcare but patients report gaps between its perceived importance and its demonstration. Empathy and compassion have been associated with quality of life and significant health outcomes but these characteristics are not optimally measured or used for performance and organizational improvement. OBJECTIVE: To address these gaps, we conducted a study with the objective of evaluating the properties of the 12-item Schwartz Center Compassionate Care Scale® using psychometric analysis and cognitive debriefing. METHODS: Non-hospitalized patients with multiple chronic conditions were sampled using an on-line platform. Classical test theory and Rasch measurement theory were used to evaluate psychometric properties of the scale. Structured questions elicited cognitive responses regarding clarity of each item. RESULTS: Classical test theory analysis confirmed that the 12-item Schwartz Center Compassionate Care Scale is a unidimensional scale with excellent internal consistency and test-retest reliability. Patients' ratings of compassionate behaviors using the Schwartz Center Compassionate Care Scale correlated significantly with a related instrument designed to measure empathy, demonstrating convergent validity. Rasch measurement theory showed that reducing the number of response options on 3 items in the scale would improve respondents' discrimination between responses on these items. Although person-item threshold distribution analysis showed that patients may wish to rate compassionate care at levels both higher and lower than the scale permits, items could be ordered on an interval scale from low to high levels of compassionate care. CONCLUSIONS: The current 12-item Schwartz Center Compassionate Care Scale demonstrates excellent psychometric properties by Classical Test Theory and Rasch measurement theory. The 12-item Schwartz Center Compassionate Care Scale adds questions related to understanding and discussing emotional, contextual issues and the needs of the patient and family. Easily completed on-line, it could be used for work-place based assessment and feedback to clinicians and performance or quality improvement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".