Improving the Multimorbidity Treatment Burden Questionnaire

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Further development and validation of the Multimorbidity Treatment Burden Questionnaire

• IRAS ID

  236536

• Contact name

  Polly Duncan

• Contact email

  polly.duncan@bristol.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  University of Bristol

• Duration of Study in the UK

  0 years, 11 months, 10 days

• Research summary

  Treatment burden is the ‘effort of looking after your health and the impact that this has on everyday life’. This includes taking lots of medicines, co-ordinating healthcare appointments and self-monitoring. Having a good measure of treatment burden for patients with multimorbidity (multiple long-term illnesses) is extremely important because these patients are commonly prescribed lots of different medications and are required to attend separate appointments for each of their illnesses.

  The MTBQ was developed and tested as part of the 3D Study, a research trial. The questionnaire performed well in statistical tests but there are four important limitations. Firstly, one in five participants had an overall score of zero. As it is not possible to improve from a score of zero, this can make it difficult to detect change after an intervention. Secondly, it was not possible to test whether participants would give the same answers if they were asked to complete the questionnaire again (known as test-retest reliability). Thirdly, to test construct validity (expected relationships between the MTBQ and other variables), we used proxy measures which we expected to correlate with high and low treatment burden scores, such as health related quality of life score, rather than direct measures of treatment burden, such as number of hospital appointments. Fourthly, as the MTBQ was developed and validated as part of a research trial, it may not be generalizable to non-trial populations.

  The purpose of this study is to:
  (i) Examine whether reversing the scale of the questionnaire improves skewness of the data
  (ii) Assess test-retest reliability
  (iii) Compare responses, validity and ease of completion of the MTBQ with a comparator questionnaire, the Treatment Burden Questionnaire
  (iv) Assess how to interpret MTBQ scores in a non-trial population
  (v) Explore the relationship between patients’ understanding of information about their health and treatment burden

• REC name

  London - Bromley Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  18/LO/1051

• Date of REC Opinion

  8 Jun 2018

• REC opinion

  Favourable Opinion