Developing and testing inter‐rater reliability of a data collection tool for patient health records on end‐of‐life care of neurological patients in an acute hospital ward

Abstract

Abstract Aim Develop and test a data collection tool—Neurological End‐Of‐Life Care Assessment Tool (NEOLCAT)—for extracting data from patient health records (PHRs) on end‐of‐life care of neurological patients in an acute hospital ward. Design Instrument development and inter‐rater reliability (IRR) assessment. Method NEOLCAT was constructed from patient care items obtained from clinical guidelines and literature on end‐of‐life care. Expert clinicians reviewed the items. Using percentage agreement and Fleiss' kappa we calculated IRR on 32 nominal items, out of 76 items. Results IRR of NEOLCAT showed 89% (range 83%–95%) overall categorical percentage agreement. The Fleiss' kappa categorical coefficient was 0.84 (range 0.71–0.91). There was fair or moderate agreement on six items, and moderate or almost perfect agreement on 26 items. Conclusion The NEOLCAT shows promising psychometric properties for studying clinical components of care of neurological patients at the end‐of‐life on an acute hospital ward but could be further developed in future studies.

Keywords

• end‐of‐life care
• face validity
• instrument development
• inter‐rater reliability
• neurological patients
• patient health records