Many older people spend a lot of time in bed while in the hospital. Bed rest affects almost every part of the body. It causes symptoms such as dizziness, tiredness, and trouble sleeping. Older people often try to manage these symptoms by staying in bed, which makes their symptoms worse. These symptoms can only be evaluated by the people experiencing them. So, future research to address bed rest will involve asking people to rate their symptoms.
But, in our previous research, many older patients had trouble answering questions about the symptoms. They said the questions had too much information in them. So, we revised the questions by breaking them up. Then, in this study, we tested the revised questions to see if the changes affected the questions’ validity and reliability.
We found that the changes improved older patients’ ability to answer the questions without affecting the validity or reliability of the questions. The findings support using the revised questions with older patients so they can participate in research on symptoms related to bed rest.
This study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research
