Measuring Health Professionals' Skills and Self-Efficacy for Communicating with Individuals with Disabilities: Instrument Development and Validation.

Individuals with disabilities experience numerous health disparities compared to their non-disabled peers and face inequities associated with challenges accessing care, stigma, and bias. Health professionals have the opportunity to address health inequities through improved communication, a primary barrier to receiving quality care; however more training is needed. There are limitations to existing tools to measure the skills or self-efficacy of professionals to communicate with individuals with disabilities, and to assess the effectiveness of training programs. The purpose of this study was to develop and validate an instrument to measure health professionals' communication skills and self-efficacy specifically related to working with individuals with disabilities. After a comprehensive review of literature, expert review of proposed scale items, and pilot test, a 19-item survey was administered to 237 healthcare and health and physical education professionals. Construct validity was evaluated by performing an exploratory factor analysis on each subscale and Cronbach's alpha coefficient was used to measure internal consistency. For the skills subscale, Cronbach's α = .919 and for the self-efficacy subscale Cronbach's α = .949 after the removal of one item, resulting in a final 18-item inventory that demonstrates strong validity and reliability.

Peer 2 peer: efficacy of a course-based peer education intervention to increase physical activity among college students.

UNLABELLED: There are few physical activity (PA) interventions in higher education, and they have been only minimally effective. OBJECTIVE: To determine if a course-based, peer education intervention was associated with increases in PA and physical fitness. PARTICIPANTS: Participants were 178 students enrolled in a personal health class during the 2007-2008 academic year. METHODS: A quasi-experimental design was used to assess the effect of the intervention. Repeated measures analysis of covariance was employed to test the impact of the intervention on students' PA, body composition, waist-to-hip ratio, cardiovascular fitness, flexibility, and muscular strength. RESULTS: Women in the treatment group classified as "Inactive" at baseline increased PA, whereas "Inactive" control women had reductions in PA. Women in the treatment group who were "Active" at baseline reduced their waist-to-hip ratio and increased flexibility. There were no differences by treatment group among men. CONCLUSIONS: The intervention was effective in improving PA and physical fitness among college women.

An examination of policies addressing resident smoking in nursing homes.

OBJECTIVES: To report findings of a nationwide project that examined nursing homes' tobacco policies for residents. DESIGN: A random selection procedure was used to sample nursing homes proportional to the geographic distribution of nursing homes in the United States. Rubrics were developed to objectively describe and compare policies. SETTING: Policies were obtained from 4 types of facilities: (1) facilities that allow smoking indoors and outdoors (I/O-SFs), (2) facilities that allow residents to smoke outdoors only (O-SFs), (3) facilities that do not allow residents to smoke indoors or out of doors (NSFs), and (4) facilities in transition (TFs) from a smoking facility to an NSF. MEASURES: Rubrics used to score policies had common categories: administrative/authority issues, notification, resident smoking, safety, cessation assistance/encouragement, and smoking areas. Criteria within each category varied to reflect the smoking regulations of each type of facility (eg, policies of facilities that do not allow smoking indoors were not examined for inclusion of issues related to ventilation). RESULTS: Facilities' policies from geographically diverse facilities are described. Across all facilities, mean percentages reflecting policies' overall comprehensiveness were low, and when examining specific components of the policies, few areas were consistently addressed across facilities. CONCLUSIONS: Considerable gaps were found in written policies regarding smoking. Although nursing homes may in fact have practices that are more extensive than their policies portray, creating policies that guide practice can assist these long-term care facilities to promote an environment that aligns with their goals and desired practices to protect the health of residents and staff.