The Adaptation of the Sheffield Profile for Assessment and Referral for Care (SPARC) to the Polish Clinical Setting for Needs Assessment of Advanced Cancer Patients

ContextAssessment of the needs of advanced cancer patients is a very important issue in palliative care.ObjectivesThe aim of the study was to adapt the Sheffield Profile for Assessment and Referral for Care (SPARC) to the Polish environment and evaluate its usefulness in needs assessment of patients with advanced cancer.MethodsA forward-back translation of the SPARC to Polish was done. The SPARC was used once in 58 consecutive patients with advanced cancer during follow-up. The patients were enrolled from a palliative care unit (25 patients), home care (18 patients), and a day care center (15 patients). The reliability was evaluated by establishing the internal consistency using Cronbach's alpha coefficients. Content validity was analyzed in accordance with the theories of needs by Murray and Maslow as a nonstatistical method of validity assessment. Factor analysis with principal components extraction and varimax rotation of raw data was used to reduce the set of data and assess the construct validity.ResultsThere were differences regarding religious and spiritual issues and independence and activity between patients in the palliative care unit (worse results) and those at the day care center (better scores). Communication and need for more information items were associated with psychological, social, spiritual, and treatment issues. Cronbach's alpha coefficients and factor analysis demonstrated, respectively, satisfactory reliability and construct validity of the tool.ConclusionThe study demonstrated that the Polish version of the SPARC is a valid and reliable tool recommended for the needs assessment and symptom evaluation of patients with advanced cancer.