1 INTRODUCTION
The PaRental Experience with Care for Children with serIOUS illnesses (PRECIOUS) instrument is a validated 45-item parent-reported experience measure of Quality of Care for children with serious illnesses. It takes about 10 minutes to complete and is designed for comprehensive evaluation of parental perspectives on the Quality of Care. Hundreds of multi-disciplinary experts and parents of children with serious illnesses have contributed to its development and validation.
The validated 10-item short-form PRECIOUS (‘PRECIOUS-SF’) can be completed in less than 3 minutes. PRECIOUS-SF offers a quicker but less detailed assessment and can be incorporated into routine clinical assessments to obtain regular, timely assessment of service provision.
Sites may consider starting with PRECIOUS-SF; if scores are low and/or if they wish to obtain more in-depth information, the longer form may be appropriate. Both measures assess quality of care in various settings (e.g. hospital, community-based services, home) and throughout a child’s illness trajectory.
We distribute the measures free of charge, upon the completion of a brief request form here for PRECIOUS, or here for PRECIOUS-SF. You
will receive the following:
- PRECIOUS/PRECIOUS-SF in Qualtrics (.qsf)
- PRECIOUS/PRECIOUS-SF in Word Document (.docx)
- PRECIOUS/PRECIOUS-SF in PDF (.pdf)
- Scoring algorithm for Stata (.do)
2 CHECK IT OUT
The following video introduces the PRECIOUS and PRECIOUS-SF measures.
3 HOW TO ADMINISTER AND SCORE
Both PRECIOUS and PRECIOUS-SF are self-administered and instructions for parent-respondents are included in the measures. Conversion equations from PRECIOUS-SF to PRECIOUS scale scores are available to facilitate comparison and benchmarking across studies and/or sites using different versions of the instrument.
A respondent’s data yields one score per scale.
Given the five-point Likert scale where 0 represents ‘Never’ and 4 indicates ‘Always’, we propose the following interpretation for scale scores.
- 0 to <1: processes never take place.
- 1 to <2: processes seldom take place.
- 2 to <3: processes take place inconsistently.
- 3 to <4: processes take place almost always.
Programming statements for use with Stata are available upon request.
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You may also be interested in viewing the following journal articles:
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Citation for using/reporting PRECIOUS:
Ang FJL et al., PRECIOUS demonstrated satisfactory measurement properties for assessing the quality of care for children with serious illnesses, Journal of Clinical Epidemiology (2024).
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Citation for using/reporting PRECIOUS Short-Form:
Ang, F.J.L., Cheung, Y.B., Gandhi, M. et al. Development of the PRECIOUS Short-Form (PRECIOUS-SF) quality of care measure for children with serious illnesses, Journal of Patient Rep Outcomes 9, 12 (2025).
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Ang FJL et al., Development of the Parental Experience with Care for Children with Serious Illnesses (PRECIOUS) Quality of Care Measure, BMC Palliative Care (2024).
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Ang FJL et al., A Qualitative Exploration of Parental Perspectives on Quality of Care for Children with Serious Illnesses. Frontiers in Pediatrics (2023).
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Ang FJL et al., Finkelstein, E. A., & Gandhi, M. Parent-Reported Experience Measures of Care for Children With Serious Illnesses: A Scoping Review. Pediatric Critical Care Medicine (2022).