The development of a questionnaire to assess the willingness of Chinese community health workers to implement advance care planning

BACKGROUND: To develop a questionnaire to evaluate the willingness of Chinese health care workers to implement an advance care planning (ACP) program for patients in a Chinese cultural context. METHODS: Guided by the framework of the theory of planned behavior (TPB), a literature analysis and semi-structured interviews were conducted to create a pool of questionnaire items, and then the initial assessment questionnaire was developed by two rounds of expert consultations. A random sampling method was used to pre-survey 204 health care workers in community health service centers (CHSCs) in three urban areas of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province. The final questionnaire was derived from item analysis and exploratory factor analysis. RESULTS: Based on exploratory factor analysis, five common factors were identified from the questionnaire on community health care workers‘(CHWs) willingness to implement ACP. In general, the content validity of the questionnaire was 0.91, and the content validity of each of the entries ranged from 0.80 to 1.00, indicating acceptable overall questionnaire content validity. The total Cronbach coefficient for the questionnaire was 0.966, the Cronbach coefficient for each dimension ranged from 0.865 to 0.954, and the retest reliability was 0.856. The questionnaire produced a final draft containing five dimensions (behavioral attitudes, subjective norms, direct control, indirect control, and behavioral intentions) and 30 items. CONCLUSION: The questionnaire on the willingness of CHWs to implement ACP was validated and found to be reliable. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12904-022-01046-8.