A Medication Assessment Tool to Evaluate Prescribers’ Adherence to Practice Guidelines in Bipolar Disorder: Development and Psychometric Properties

Background: In the last decades, bipolar disorder treatments have undergone a gradual shift away from relying on clinical expertise to adopting evidence-based practice guidelines and expert consensus, leading an improvement in medical care safety, patient performance, quality of life. Nonetheless, suboptimal prescribing has remained issue, there is excellent opportunity for improving standards reduce symptoms’ recurrence, frequent hospitalizations, costs. Objectives: This study aimed develop validate medication assessment tool evaluating prescribers’ adherence pharmacotherapy recommendations outlined during acute phase Iran (MATAPBD). Methods: mixed-method was conducted August 2021 May 2022. A 54-item pool developed based results literature review research group discussion. The validity (i.e., face, content, construct) reliability stability internal consistency) were evaluated. Results: Four items rewritten qualitative content validity. Then, eleven five excluded scale terms having low ratios corrected item-total correlation, respectively. construct MATAPBD assessed by maximum-likelihood exploratory factor analysis method Promax rotation. number latent factors calculated performing Horn’s parallel analysis. analysis, remaining 17 categorized into four which explained 57.97% total extracted variance. Cronbach’s alpha McDonald’s omega all > 0.7, intraclass correlation coefficient 0.914 revealing strong MATAPBD. Conclusions: had good psychometric properties may been valuable evaluate guideline disorder.