Chronic diseases such as diabetes mellitus have a significant impact on the lives of people living with them. The Diabetes Health Profile 18 (DHP-18) is an 18-question, diabetes-specific measurement instrument that assesses the psychological and behavioural impact of living with diabetes and generates a health profile that measures psychological distress, barriers to activity and uninhibited eating.
The DHP-18 has been used in different countries such as the United Kingdom, Norway and Singapore, among others. In Ecuador and Latin America it has not been used so far. For its use it is necessary to carry out a previous validation that guarantees linguistic adaptation and cultural relevance, as well as psychometric validation, ensuring that the instrument measures what it is intended to measure and is reproducible over time.
Having a validated instrument in Ecuador will allow a better understanding of the quality of life of diabetic patients and will serve as an indicator integrated into the information that health personnel handle for more efficient decision making in the correct health care.
For this reason, the CEAD project is carrying out the validation of the DHP-18 for use in Ecuador. As a first phase, the linguistic validation and cultural adaptation of the instrument has been carried out with the participation of eight people with diabetes and health professionals, and a definitive version is now available for psychometric validation.
In the next phase, 145 people with diabetes will be interviewed in different community settings, mainly health centres, and information related to their quality of life will be collected using the Ecuadorian version of the DHP-18. After 2 weeks the questionnaire will be repeated to half of the participants to assess its reproducibility. This will provide a linguistically and psychometrically validated DHP-18 for use with the diabetic population in Ecuador.
