Fátima Cunha

Assessing a person’s capacity to engage in self-care behaviours is another added value in identifying one’s potential to care for oneself in the health domain that contributes to planning person-centred care. This study aimed to translate, adapt, and validate the Exercise of Self-Care Agency (ESCA) Scale by Kearney and Fleischer, revised by Riesch and Hauck for the Portuguese version, using a sample of 625 elderly people living at home in Portugal. A cross-cultural adaptation process follows the stages of translation, synthesis, back-translation, and consensual solution for the translation process and pretesting. Construct validity was tested using exploratory factor analysis, and factor structure was subjected to confirmatory factor analysis. Reliability was determined by analysing internal consistency, resorting to Cronbach’s alpha coefficient. This resulted in an instrument formed of 29 items, keeping the factor structure conceptually aligned with the underlying theory. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient values were 0.87 for the global scale and varied between 0.65 and 0.84 for the subscales. The final four-factor model showed an acceptable quality of fit. The Portuguese version of the ESCA shows appropriate validity and reliability for use in future research and health contexts.

Introduction This article presents an analysis of the Self-Care Capacity of elderly people living at home, identifying variables that interfere with it. Aging is a stage of life in which health needs undergo continuous changes resulting from disease situations and the aging process, therefore, the implementation of adequate and effective support for the ability to take care of oneself will contribute to the promotion of health and well-being. Objective To identify variables that interfere with the Self-Care Capacity of elderly people living at home. Method This is a non-experimental, cross-sectional, quantitative descriptive and correlational study, involving 400 participants who met the inclusion criteria. Assessment of self-care capacity using the Exercise of Self-Care Agency – ESCA. Results Based on the multivariate analysis of variance, the existence of statistically significant differences was identified in some domains of Self-Care Capacity according to age, education and self-perception of the elderly person's health status. Overall, positive correlations were found between age and the domain Initiative and responsibility (3.6%) and between education and the domain Knowledge and information seeking (5.2%) and negative correlations between age and the domain Knowledge and information seeking (3.7%). We also found that elderly people who perceived themselves as unable to take care of themselves showed lower scores in the Knowledge and information seeking domain than those who perceived themselves as able to take care of themselves, both when self-perceived as healthy or as having a pathology (difference in mean scores of -.38 and -.53, respectively, p<.05). Conclusion In view of these data, and given that ageing is a stage of multiple challenges in self-care, we suggest that nurses should consider multiple strategies for elderly people to access, understand, interpret and integrate the content of the information that allows them to take care of themselves.