Objective: To develop a measure of the needs injured children and their families' needs throughout recovery; The MAnchester Needs Tool for Injured Children (MANTIC).
Design: Tool development, psychometric testing.
Setting: Five children's major trauma centres in England.
Participants: Children aged 2 to 16 years with any type of moderate/severe injury(ies) treated in a major trauma centre within 12 months of injury, plus their parents.
Methods: Stage 1a (Item generation): Interviews with injured children and their parents to generate draft items. Stage 1b (Co-production): Feedback about item clarity, relevance and appropriate response options was provided by parents and the patient and public involvement group. Stage 2 (Psychometric development): Completion of the prototype MANTIC by injured children and their parents with restructuring (as necessary) to establish construct validity. Concurrent validity was assessed by correlation with quality of life (EQ-5D-Y). MANTICs were repeated 2 weeks later to assess test-retest reliability.
Results: Stages 1a,b: Interviews (13 injured children, 19 parents) generated 64 items with semantic differential four-point response scale (strongly disagree, disagree, agree, strongly agree). Stage 2: One hundred and forty-four participants completed MANTIC questionnaires (mean age 9.8 years, SD 3.8; 68.1% male). Item responses were strong requiring only minor changes to establish construct validity. Concurrent validity with quality of life was moderate (r = 0.55, P < 0.01) as was test-retest reliability (ICC = 0.46 and 0.59, P < 0.001). Uni-dimensionality was strong (Cronbach's α > 0.7).
Conclusion: The MANTIC is a feasible, acceptable, valid self-report measure of the needs of injured children and their families, freely available for clinical or research purposes.
Keywords: Child rehabilitation; injury/Trauma; questionnaire; unmet needs; validity.