Palliative care improves quality of life in the context of a serious illness, but misperceptions of palliative care lead patients and caregivers to fear it, clinicians to avoid making referrals, and administrators and policy makers to avoid programmatic development. The PCAS-9 measures the extent to which patients fear or are comfortable with palliative care (emotional subscale), believe it is beneficial (cognitive subscale), and would be willing to use it if referred (behavioral subscale). The measure is reliability, valid, and responsive to educational interventions.
Administration and Scoring
The measure was originally published as the Palliative Care Preferences Scale (PCPS-14) |PDF|
Laura Perry, PhD, has winnowed the scale down to 9 items, remaned it the PCAS, and conducted extensive validation studies in various samples of patients with serious illnesses (cancer, heart failure, kidney failure, advanced COPD, etc.). A full psychometric evaluation of the PCAS-9 has been published. |PDF|
As noted in the above publication, the original PCPS-14 demonstrated evidence of reliability, validity, factor structure, and responsivenes to an intervention. The PCAS-9 retains these characteristics and is shorter.
Permission to Use
No permission is required to use our measures.
Free! Our team has developed several survey measures over the years. Most of these measures were developed with the support of federal, state, intramural, and foundation funds, so they are available free of charge.
Modifications? You are welcome to make modifications to "improve" our measures for your population and research question if under the guidance of a psychologist or other professional with expertise in psychometrics. Please note any changes in the methods section of resulting manuscripts.
