Self-Care of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease - Patient Version

The Self-care of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Inventory (SC-COPDI) was developed by a team of Italian researchers based on the Middle-Theory of Self-care of Chronic Illness. The SC-COPDI is a 5-point Likert type instrument that comprises 32-items divided into three scales. The 13-items Self-Care Maintenance Scale measures the behaviors performed by people with COPD to maintain the disease stable through the prevention of respiratory infection and adherence to prescriptions, and to promote health through the maintenance of respiratory functionality and physical activities. The 8-items Self-Care Monitoring Scale describes the monitoring of different clusters of symptoms that people with COPD presents: the triads of respiratory symptoms (dyspnea, coughing and sputum), and the additional disease manifestations, such as fatigue and sleep disturbance, and the side effects of medications. A further item is added to this scale to determine whether respondents experience symptoms and their rapidity in recognizing them as symptoms of COPD. The 10-items Self-Care Management Scale describes the behaviors that people with COPD perform autonomously, those that they perform after consulting healthcare providers and those carried out to solve common daily problems. Asymptomatic people with COPD skip the Self-Care Management Scale because they cannot respond to questions about symptom management if they do not have symptoms. The reliability and validity of these scales in an Italian sample are reported in this publication: Matarese, M. et al, (2019). The Self-Care in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Inventory: Development and Psychometric Evaluation. Evaluation & the Health Professions. doi: 10.1177/0163278719856660. In addition to the 3 scales described above, this instrument includes an embedded self-care self-efficacy scale (SCES) developed by the same team of researchers to measure self-care self-efficacy in people with COPD. The 7-items scale has two factors that describe the confidence of people with COPD in their ability to adhere to prescriptions and to manage symptoms.