The Sickness Impact Profile for nursing homes (SIP-NH)

Area of Science:

• Gerontology
• Health Services Research
• Psychometrics

Background:

• Functional status measures are crucial for the growing nursing home population.
• Existing tools like the Sickness Impact Profile (SIP) may not be optimally relevant or efficient for this demographic.
• There is a need for a valid and feasible functional status measure tailored to nursing home residents.

Purpose of the Study:

• To adapt the Sickness Impact Profile (SIP) for nursing home residents, enhancing relevance and reducing respondent burden.
• To maintain the internal consistency and validity of the adapted measure.
• To develop the Sickness Impact Profile for Nursing Homes (SIP-NH).

Main Methods:

• A nominal group process was used to identify and remove items from the SIP.
• 231 nursing home residents (aged ≥60, Mini-Mental State Exam score ≥11) participated.
• Item reduction was guided by environmental relevance, item-total correlations, and contribution to internal consistency, while maintaining high correlation (r ≥ .90) with the original SIP and acceptable alpha coefficients.

Main Results:

• The Sickness Impact Profile for Nursing Homes (SIP-NH) was developed with 66 items, representing a 51.5% reduction from the original SIP.
• High correlations were observed between SIP-NH and SIP scores (total score r = .98, Physical dimension r = .97, Psychosocial dimension r = .97).
• The SIP-NH demonstrated acceptable internal consistency and comparable convergent and discriminant validity with established instruments.

Conclusions:

• The SIP-NH is a valid and feasible measure that significantly reduces respondent burden for nursing home residents.
• The adapted instrument maintains acceptable psychometric properties, including internal consistency and external validity.
• Further longitudinal evaluation is recommended to assess the responsiveness of the SIP-NH to changes over time.