Purpose: We aimed to better understand how similarly patients with colorectal cancer and caregivers view care quality and to assess factors that may influence concordance.
Materials and methods: We conducted a secondary analysis of paired patient and caregiver quality ratings of colorectal cancer care in three specific domains: surgery, chemotherapy overall, and chemotherapy nursing. Agreement was assessed with difference scores, concordance with Gwet second-order agreement statistics (AC2), and variation in agreement with stratified analyses. We examined whether the care experiences of patients and caregivers were associated with top-box (most-positive) ratings and examined variations in concordance on the basis of the presence of a top-box score.
Results: Four hundred seventeen patient-caregiver dyads completed the surveys. Quality-of-care ratings were positively skewed, with most dyads indicating top-box ratings. Patient and caregiver care experiences were highly associated with top-box ratings. Overall patient-caregiver concordance was very high for all three care domains (surgery: AC2, 0.87 [95% CI, 0.83 to 0.90]; chemotherapy overall: AC2, 0.84 [95% CI, 0.79 to 0.88]; chemotherapy nursing: AC2, 0.91 [95% CI, 0.87 to 0.94]). Stratified analyses of patient and caregiver characteristics did not identify any patterns that consistently affected concordance. The concordance statistic significantly decreased for all three outcomes (P < .001), however, when the patient or caregiver assessed quality as anything other than top box.
Conclusion: Caregiver and patient reports on care quality were highly concordant for top-box care and did not vary with patient or caregiver factors. Additional exploration is needed to identify reasons for increased variability when the quality scores were less than a top-box response.