The Camberwell Assessment of Needs questionnaire (CAN) was developed in the Institute of Psychiatry (London) in the 1990's and constitutes one of the most widely accepted instruments to assess needs of people suffering from long term psychotic disorders. This assessment instrument was translated into Spanish by the Andalusian Group of Research in Mental Health. This paper describes both the methods and most significant results on the reliability of the Spanish version of the CAN.
Methods: 246 patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia were interviewed as well as staff involved in their care. Kappa index was used to study concordance among the results obtained from interviews to the patients and those obtained from the staff. We calculated both inter-rater reliability and test-retest reliability.
Results: the mean score of needs was 6.47 in the patients sample and 6.49 in the staff sample. The level of agreement amongst patients and staff interviewed was moderate/strong. Inter-rater agreement was high (r=0.986 (patients) / 0.976 (staff), p<0.01). Similarly, test-retest agreement was r=0.791 in the patients group and r=0.766 in the staff sample (p<0.01).
Conclusions: this study suggests that the Spanish version of the CAN is a highly reliable instrument to evaluate needs of people suffering from long-term psychotic disorders. It also is easy and fast to administer. However, we believe it may have some transcultural difficulties in certain areas as responses might be dependent on socio-cultural context.