Measuring healthcare professionals’ perceptions of their ability to adopt shared decision making: Translation and psychometric evaluation of the Danish version of the IcanSDM questionnaire

Background Shared decision making in healthcare is a fundamental right for patients. Healthcare professionals' perception of their own abilities to enable shared decision making is crucial for implementing shared decision making within service. IcanSDM (I can shared decision making) is a brief measure to investigate healthcare professionals' perception of shared decision making approaches to their practices. It was developed in Canada with French and English versions, and recently translated into German. This study aims to adapt the IcanSDM measure for Danish-speaking healthcare professionals, and evaluate its psychometric properties.

Methods Cultural adaptation and translation based on Beaton et al.'s approach was applied. A forward translation by ten people and a backward translation by two people were performed. To assess comprehensibility, cognitive interviews were conducted with 24 healthcare professionals. Eighty healthcare professionals who were trained in shared decision making for either one hour (n = 65) or one day (n = 15) participated in the psychometric evaluation. The evaluation concerned acceptance, item characteristics, skewness, item difficulties, corrected item-total correlations, inter-item correlations, factorial structure, internal consistency, and responsiveness.

Results The forward and backward translation revealed few discrepancies, and participants understood the items well. The psychometric evaluation showed a high completion rate and acceptable item difficulties and discrimination values. Both the factor analysis and the internal consistency showed a 2-factor structure: 1) healthcare professionals' capacity to implement shared decision making; and 2) healthcare professionals' capacity to practise shared decision making. The IcanSDM_Danish obtained a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of 0.74. The evaluation of responsiveness showed improvement, but was not statistically significant.

Conclusion The IcanSDM_Danish has good cross-cultural validity and internal consistency, and a 2-factor structure. The IcanSDM_Danish is capable of providing reliable and valid measurement when evaluating constructed knowledge about shared decision making, and may be able to support the implementation of shared decision making training and evaluation of its impact.