Development and validation of a brief diabetic foot risk screening scale for diabetic patients

Objective: To develop a concise screening tool for diabetic foot risk assessment in patients with diabetes, and rigorously evaluate its reliability and validity. Methods: 390 adults diagnosed with diabetes were selected for a study in Changsha, China. The study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, initial items were developed by amalgamating existing diabetic foot risk screening tools and group discussions. Additionally, diabetic foot experts established content validity during this phase. In the second phase, the validity and reliability of the developed items were evaluated through various methods such as item analysis, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, Cronbach's alpha coefficient, retest reliability, inter-rater reliability, ROC curve and AUC. Results: The Brief Diabetic Foot Risk Screening Scale consists of 6 dimensions and 19 items. An exploratory factor analysis was conducted on the scale, revealing six principal factors that accounted for 74.139 % of the total variance. The I-CVI was greater than 0.8, indicating good content validity, while the S-CVI was 0.737. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the model fit well. The scale's Cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.770, indicating good internal consistency, and its test-retest reliability was 0.958. The AUC suggests that the Brief Diabetic Foot Risk Screening Scale is an effective measure for identifying diabetic foot. Conclusion: The Scale is a reliable and valid tool for assessing foot risk.