Development and psychometric evaluation of an assessment tool assessing Pharmacists' knowledge and practice on...

Despite advancements in cancer therapy, opportunistic infections remain a significant obstacle to successful patient outcomes. This highlights the necessity for research into the role of antimicrobial prophylaxis in preventing opportunistic infections within oncology care. Therefore, this study aims to develop and validate a questionnaire that assesses pharmacists' knowledge and practices regarding antimicrobial prophylaxis in cancer patients.

The research was conducted in 2 phases. Phase I focused on questionnaire development, which included assessing content validity using face validity, Delphi technique, and pilot testing. An initial questionnaire comprising 53 items was generated. The questionnaire was then distributed, and the data were collected from Survey Monkey. Phase II involved the psychometric evaluation of the questionnaire's validity and reliability. Data analysis was performed using Item Response Theory (IRT), Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), and Cronbach's alpha to establish construct validity and reliability.

The finalized questionnaire consists of 43 items, comprising 29 knowledge and 14 practice items. IRT analysis was applied to knowledge items, with acceptable discrimination (≥0.25), difficulty (-3-3), and guessing (≤0.4) parameters. Eight items were removed from the knowledge domain based on IRT analysis. Furthermore, EFA has shown high correlation between items and their respective factor, with each receiving an acceptable factor loading of >0.4. However, one domain has a reliability value of <0.6, hence, the domain was removed from the practice domain. Overall, Cronbach's alpha of 0.83 indicates strong internal consistency among the questionnaire items.

The results of this study have validated that the developed questionnaire possesses exceptional psychometric qualities, confirming its accuracy and reliability to evaluate pharmacists' knowledge and practice towards antimicrobial prophylaxis in oncology care. The validated tool enables future research and targeted educational interventions to improve pharmacists' skills in managing infection risks for cancer patients.