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Dyspnoea at the end of life: instrument development and validation-the CONFORTO Strategy
Isadora Crosara Alves Teixeira1, Ana Maria Porto Carvas2, Ricardo Borges da Silva3
1Internal Medicine Department, School of Medicine, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiânia, Goiás, Brazil isadoracrosara@gmail.com.
Objective:
To describe the construction and validation of the algorithm for Criteria for inclusion; Objective of dyspnoea; Notification of patient/family/health professionals; Facial air flow; Oxygen; Relaxion and breathing; Treating causes of dyspnoea and Opioid (CONFORTO), an instrument to guide health professionals in managing dyspnoea in patients with an advance stage of the disease at the end-of-life.
Methods:
The study was carried out in three stages: (1) literature review and construction of CONFORTO; (2) semantic validation; (3) application of the CONFORTO Strategy to health professionals as a test (before video lessons) and post-test (20 days after watching video lessons) methodology. The scores obtained in the pretest and post-test were compared using the Wilcoxon test.
Results:
Seventy-four professionals from different internal medicine and intensive care units participated in the study. The CONFORTO Strategy involved eight acronym-forming items: Criteria for inclusion; Objective of dyspnoea; Notification of patient/family/health professionals; Facial air flow; Oxygen; Relaxion and breathing; Treating causes of dyspnoea and Opioid. The post-test indicated a significant increase in the score for the following items: facial air flow (p=0.016); oxygen (p=0.002); relaxation and breathing (p=0.002) and treating the causes of dyspnoea (p=0.011). The increase in score occurred after the training sessions with video lessons.
Conclusion:
The CONFORTO Strategy proved valid and reliable for managing dyspnoea in patients with an advanced stage of the disease at the end-of-life. Because the instrument is easy-to-use, it can be used by the entire health team at any assistance-providing location, and can, thus, contribute to improving dyspnoea management for these patients.
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