Construcción de un cuestionario de valoración de la salud social de los usuarios que ingresan en un centro sociosanitario. Resultados preliminares

Introduction: social health can be defined as the best possible situation for each of the areas that make up a person's social environment. This article presents the preliminary results of the creation of a Social Health Evaluation Questionnaire (SHEV), aimed at assessing the social health status of users of hospitals for the elderly and disabled. Material and methods: the contents of well-known instruments were analysed and the working team selected the areas considered necessary to be able to evaluate social health status. The team then determined the possible situations in which individuals could find themselves in each of these areas and created questions to help them describe these situations. Subsequently, in a meeting with a group of experts, an overall agreement was reached on the scope and content of the final questions to be included in the questionnaire. Results: the distinct areas, which correspond to independent subscales in the SHEV, were: informal support, formal support, economic situation, housing, and social and family integration. Sex (p < 0.001), educational status (p = 0.017) and social class (p = 0.029) were associated with economic situation. Marital status was associated with economic situation (p = 0.002) and informal support (p = 0.030). The mean answering time was 13.5 minutes. Conclusions: the SHEV proved to be an easy tool to administer. No significant differences based upon responders were found, except in the subscale of informal support. Further validation and a more thorough investigation of the relationship between the SHEV as answered by patients or by their carers is required.