development of thalassemia medication questionnaire (tmq): an instrument for measuring major thalassemia patients’ knowledge and practice regarding their medications

Background: thalassemia is a congenital disease and iran is as one of the countries in thethalassemia belt. it has a huge burden in iranian national health budget. the aim of this study wasto develop a questionnaire to assess the knowledge and practice of thalassemia patients toward theirmedications.methods: this is a methodological research, which was done from april 2020 to november2021 in tehran, iran, to develop a valid and reliable instrument for measuring major thalassemiapatients’ knowledge and practice regarding their medications, a questionnaire based on three ironchelating medications (deferoxamine, deferiprone, and deferasirox) developed. this process doneby holding several expert panel meetings. this questionnaire was consisting of some aspects suchas: administration, self-monitoring, miss dose, common interactions, and adverse events. contentvalidity index (cvi) and internal consistency and reliability were calculated.results: the cvi was as 0.76 for deferoxamine, 0.80 deferiprone and 0.88 for deferasiroxquestionnaire. further analysis for internal consistency demonstrated satisfactory results withcronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging from 0.743 to 0.781. results showed thalassemia medicationquestionnaire (tmq) demonstrated acceptable validity and reliability for application.conclusion: it was concluded that tmq could be a useful instrument to measure knowledge andpractice about iron chelation therapy. the reason is the diverse range of questions and the simplicity,validity, reliability, and the practicability.