A new instrument to evaluate the quality of life on patients treated by hemodialysis (IPPE): first exploratory analysis of psychometric properties]

The article presents a new instrument for the evaluation the Quality of Life, concerning patients on haemodialysis; IPPE tool has been created to be brief, multidimensional and also capable to considering, into the evaluation of patient Quality of Life, both familiar that hospital relational aspects. The purpose of this report is to explore the factor structure and the internal validity of the IPPE questionnaire.The research involved three ASL on the territory of Salerno (57%), Verona (20.3%), Cuneo (22.7%). IPPE has been administered to 256 patients on Haemodialysis.As well as describing the IPPE's psychometric properties, the report offers a description of the normal distribution of the subjects in regard with risk and protection factors' (distinguishing the population by "age" and "gender"). The Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) of the definitive questionnaire (20 items) singles out six subscales ("perceived thirst", "body misperception", "dissatisfaction of therapeutic aspects", "perceived family support", "social daily life", "illness acceptance") that have an internal validity index alpha between .72 and .91. The Schmid-Leiman's solution confirms the existence of two macro-factors underlying as "risk factors" and "protection factors", reciprocally linked by a negative correlation (r = -.216, p < .001). SEM Analysis verifies the model "goodness of fit" and relations between risk and protection factors.The data show that when the factors of protection increase, the perception of the risk factors decreases, and vice versa. The IPPE questionnaire considers the interactions between risk and protection factors' (bio-psycho-social model), operationalizing the QoL in a new way. Based on the results observed on the literature and on this work it is possible to hypothesize that the bio-psycho-social model of QoL could be considered as a process of psycho-social adaptation.