The Caregiver Preparedness Scale is valid and reliable to measure preparedness in caregivers of heart failure patients.

Heart Failure (HF) is a complex syndrome in which patients need tofollow strict pharmacological and non pharmacological treatments. Informal care-givers (e.g., patients’ spouses or children) have a key role in helping HF patientsto cope with the disease, but several qualitative studies have shown that HF care-givers feel unprepared for this role. In other caregiver populations, caregiver pre-paredness was found associated to patients’ outcomes but no psychometricallysound instruments are available to measure preparedness in caregivers of HFpatients
 

The purpose of this study was to test validity and reliability of the 8-itemCaregiver Preparedness Scale (CPS) in caregivers of adults with HF.

We used a cross-sectional design to study a sample of HF caregiversenrolled in several hospitals and outpatient clinics located in 12 Italian provinces.We administered the CPS and collected caregivers’ sociodemographic charac-teristics (e.g., age) and patients’ clinical conditions (e.g., NYHA class). We usedconfirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to test validity and Cronbach’s alpha and factorscore determinacy coefficient to test reliability.
 

We enrolled 317 caregivers (mean age 53.73 years old, SD 15.34;72.4% females) of HF patients (mean age 71.56 years old, SD 12.74; 57.7%males; 61% in NYHA class II). CFA showed a good fit to the data for the one-factor model of the CPS (RMSEA=0.065; CFI=0.97; TLI=0.96). Cronbach’s alphaand factor score determinacy coefficient were also adequate (0.91 and 0.96 re-spectively).
 

The CPS showed supportive psychometric characteristics of va-lidity and reliability in caregivers of HF patients. The CPS can be used in futurestudies aimed at evaluating preparedness in HF caregivers and if preparednesscan predict patients’ and caregivers’ outcomes