Adaptation and evaluation of the symptom screening in pediatrics tool for use in Australia: A child friendly patient reported outcome measure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background/Objectives : Routine use of Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) to assess symptoms in childhood cancer is not common, yet children experience a significant number of symptoms. Our aims were to adapt and evaluate the Symptom Screening in Pediatrics Tool (SSPedi), a PROM developed in Canada for use with Australian children. Design/Methods : SSPedi wording was adapted and item relevance assessed by an expert clinical group (N=7) resulting in the Australian version (SSPedi‐Aus). Cognitive interviewing with children (N=10, 8‐18 years) established understanding and difficulty with completing. A second group of child‐parent dyads (N=30) were recruited to evaluate psychometric properties (content validity, test‐retest reliability, and parent‐proxy) measured with Intraclass Correlation Coefficients (ICC) with 95% Confidence Intervals (CI). Acceptability and usefulness of SSPedi‐Aus were also assessed. Results : Results Children reported some difficulty with completing SSPedi‐Aus, however correctly understood items and the scale. Construct validity was confirmed across all items by 30 children. Child test‐retest achieved excellent concordance (ICC 0.98, 95% CI 0.91 to 0.99). Symptoms causing the most distress were related to fatigue (30%), changes in taste (30%) and appetite (20%). Although parents also identified fatigue (27%), they did not identify changes in taste or appetite. Children and parents returned a similar mean total score (13.43 vs. 13.80) with a weak overall interrater reliability (ICC 0.37, 95% CI ‐0.26 to 0.70, p=0.12). Free text responses were positive: “Answering questions about my symptoms makes me feel more secure about how I will be treated in the future.” (Male patient) and “It's a good idea to have some structure to help children communicate about their symptoms” (Parent) Conclusions : Conclusion Children are distressed by symptoms that may not be identified by parents or reported to clinicians, yet these symptoms are amendable to intervention. The SSPedi‐Aus is useful to assess the level of distress caused by symptoms in children.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".