• Cristina Monforte-Royo, Luis González-de Paz, Joaquín Tomás-Sábado, Barry Rosenfeld, Julia Strupp, Raymond Voltz, and Albert Balaguer.
• Department of Nursing, School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Sant Cugat del Vallés, Barcelona, Spain.
• Qual Life Res. 2017 Jan 1; 26 (1): 235-239.

PurposeThe schedule of attitudes toward hastened death (SAHD) is widely used to assess the wish to hasten death (WTHD) among patients with life-threatening conditions. A short form of the SAHD would increase its clinical applicability in this population.MethodRasch analysis of data from 101 Spanish palliative inpatients. Item reduction involved selecting items with a high discrimination index (point-biserials ≥0.70), removing items with inadequate fit statistics, and assessing unidimensionality and local dependency. We examined the test probability function to establish an empirical risk score for suffering a WTHD and tested convergence between the original and the reduced set of items.ResultsA set of five items met all quality criteria. In this sample, 20.8 % of participants had a higher risk of a WTHD (p > 50 %) at a score of 3. Correlation analysis confirmed convergent validity between the original and reduced forms. Concurrent validity was confirmed by the similar correlations shown by both versions of the SAHD (5 and 20 items) with other measures.ConclusionThis 5-item Spanish form of the SAHD could be a suitable alternative to the full instrument. The cut-off score derived from the Rasch analysis may be able to detect patients at risk of a WTHD.

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