[Consensus approach: Prior to the construction of an evaluation scale of risk constipation patients hospitalized for...

Constipation is a frequent issue during hospitalization. Multiple causes such as the existence of irregular habits, lack of exercise as well as medical history have been identified. Drugs such as strong painkillers, central nervous system therapies and treatments of the digestive tract are a major cause of constipation. Additionally, unbalanced diet, fluid deficiency, and anxiety may aggravate constipation. The consideration of all these risk factors being under the responsibility of nurses. The difficulty to take into account such a multifactorial aetiology in nursing practice and the fact that there is no easy to use and validated tool to assess the risk of constipation in current nurse practice has led us to consider the development of a Risk Assessment scale of Constipation in Patient Hospitalized (ERCoPH) to facilitate preventive management of this trouble. We present here the first step of the elaboration of this scale, the identification of risk factors through a consensus approach after a systematic literature review.

The key informants consensus-based approach proposed by Pineault and Daveluy is based on five steps: (1) a literature review to identify risk factors for constipation; (2) the elaboration of a questionnaire containing the factors identified in the first step; (3) pre-select a panel of experts; (4) submission the questionnaire to the panel; (5) analysis the results of the consensus survey. Only factors that received a rating>6 by at least 80 % of the experts were retained.

The systematic literature review identified 69 risk factors submitted to the 23 experts of the panel. Fifteen risk factors were retained after analyzing the answers of the experts. The Scientific Committee added eight risk factors because of their importance in the literature and decided to group together some factors of the same domain.

A total of 19 risk factors were selected and grouped by major class (age, physical activity, medication, social data, food/hydration, medical and surgical history and environmental data). These factors have been tested among 300 patients enrolled in different clinical settings as part of the construction and validation of ERCoPH.