Background: Practice of family medicine and patient centeredness does not get the deserved attention in clinical practice and teaching in Sri Lanka. Non-availability of tools for assessment of patient centeredness deters the process of curricular development and research. The Patient-Practitioner Orientation Scale (PPOS) is a self-administered tool that assesses patient-centeredness in both health care professionals and patients. This study has translated and validated the PPOS to Sinhala language.
Methods: Translation and cross-cultural adaptation were carried out using forward and backward translation method. The psychometric properties of a pretested new Sinhala version of PPOS (PPOS-Sinhala) was tested in a convenience sample of 1367 patients and health professionals. Temporal stability was tested in a sub-sample of 140 individuals. The comparability of the PPOS scores and association with sex and level of education with those reported for Western populations were examined to establish construct validity.
Results: The sample included 543 medical students, 67 doctors, 335 allied health students and 422 patients. Cronbach's alpha for these groups ranged from 0.48 to 0.53 for sharing, 0.42 to 0.53 for caring, and 0.62 to 0.65 for total score. Intraclass correlation coefficients of 0.56, 0.6, and 0.4 were observed for the Total, Sharing, and Caring sub-scales, respectively. PPOS scores did not vary significantly for men and women. Health professionals exhibited higher scores than patients. Age was negatively associated and education level was positively associated with PPOS.
Discussion: PPOS-Sinhala is stable, sufficiently valid and reliable to evaluate patient centeredness among Sinhala speaking health care professionals and patients. Lower internal consistency is found for a few items in the instrument which requires further development. PPOS scores and their correlates for this Sri Lankan population were more similar to that found in other populations in this region than for scores and correlates found in the US.