Background & Aims
Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is a chronic condition growing in prevalence worldwide(1). Effective pain management strategies are repeatedly sought out by people living with KOA, often in the form of online educational resources. The Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool (PEMAT)(2) can be used to determine the quality of online resources and therefore make recommendations on the best resources for patient care. Although reliability of the tool has been studied using raters who were majority physicians, the reliability of the PEMAT being used by its end-users, people with lived experience, is unknown. The aim of this study will be to assess the inter-rater reliability (IRR) of the PEMAT when it is utilized by people with lived experience of KOA or other inflammatory conditions.
Methods
This study is in process. Participants will be provided training sessions to get familiar with the PEMAT-P (for print materials), which they will use to evaluate six online educational resources (randomly selected from a recent environmental scan) pertaining to KOA self-management. The PEMAT-P is a questionnaire comprising 17 items evaluating understandability and 7 items evaluating actionability. The two domains capture the extent to which people from diverse backgrounds and health literacy levels can process and explain the content (measuring understandability) and act upon the information (measuring actionability) from the educational resources provided to them. Total scores in each domain will be reported to determine overall quality of the resources. A satisfaction survey comprising 6 questions will also be administered to assess usability and satisfaction with using the tool.
Results
Anticipated findings will include summary tables to capture the characteristics of the participants, including education, gender, and clinical history of KOA. Descriptive statistics in the form of medians and interquartile ranges will be presented to record PEMAT-P scores. Item-level IRR will be quantified by percent agreement, Fleiss’ Kappa and Gwet’s AC1. Overall IRR for each domain will be quantified by intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC). All metrics will be reported with 95% confidence intervals.
Conclusions
This study will estimate the consistency of PEMAT scores when multiple people with lived experiences are asked to evaluate online resources describing pain management for KOA. Involving end-users in the evaluation process of determining good quality resources is an important step in patient engagement and empowerment in shared-decision making. Ultimately, findings from this study can help to determine if this tool can be readily used by people with KOA or other chronic inflammatory conditions to make judgments on which resources are effective and relevant to their needs. This puts people with lived experience at the forefront to tackle different barriers to access information, improve health literacy, promote self-efficacy and positive health behaviours.
References
1. Steinmetz JD, Culbreth GT, Haile LM, et al. Global, regional, and national burden of osteoarthritis, 1990–2020 and projections to 2050: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021. Lancet Rheumatol 2023; 5: e508–22.
2Shoemaker SJ, Wolf MS, Brach C. Development of the Patient Education Materials Assessment Tool (PEMAT): A new measure of understandability and actionability for print and audiovisual patient information. Patient Educ Couns 2014; 96: 395–403.
Presenting Author
Tara Packham
Poster Authors
Topics
- Patient Engagement and Co-Creation in Research and Education