We developed a scale for measuring pharmacists’ communication skills with respect to cancer patients. To this, we first devised 41 questions for improving communication skills needed for receiving cancer patients. We then carried out a questionnaire (41 questions with 1-5 graded Likert scale) survey of pharmacists (n=584) during August 2010. The collection and response rates were 36.3%. We used the completed responses from the 212 pharmacists for testing the reliability and the validity of our scale.
Five factors (“Problem solution skill”, “Skill in understanding patient psychology”, “Self-control skill”, “Skill in ending reception period”, and “Skill in reporting to a patient and their family”) were extracted from 29 questions for a factor analysis. There was a high coefficient of correlation between our scale and the KiSS-18 (Social Skill) (r=0.618). The reliability of this scale showed high internal consistency (Cronbach α coefficient=0.916); thus the result of test for the validity of this scale supports high content validity.
We propose the name Topics-29 for our pharmacist communication skill measuring scale.
