Study of cystic fibrosis patient skills acquisition using a pedagogical evaluation system

Introduction: We developed a pedagogical evaluation system for assessing patient skills in the context of therapeutic patient education (TPE). Objectives: To use the pedagogical evaluation system to show how patient skills change at different points in their education program, and to investigate correlations between the different skills assessed. Methods: Forty-eight cystic fibrosis patients performed three evaluations each. A total of 144 evaluations were analyzed using statistical tests. Results: In general, patients’ skill assessment scores tended to go up over time. We found stable associations among the different self-care skills and between self-care and metacognitive skills, and less stable associations among the different adaptation to illness skills. The study failed to show any correlation between self-care skills and adaptation to illness skills. Conclusion: Improvements are suggested to increase the quality of the pedagogical evaluation system, the foremost being that all the different skills should be assessed using the same problem situation.