Sensitivity and specificity of a brief scale to evaluate psychological violence at work in Peruvian health professionals

Abstract

Objective: Most studies in Latin America that evaluate psychological violence at work (PVW) focus on measuring occurrences of PVW. However, the discriminative validity and randomness of instruments used for evaluating incidents of PVW that are generated by agents internal to the workplace in the Peruvian health sector have not yet been studied. The objective of this study was to determine the sensitivity and specificity of the Scale of Psychological Violence in Health Professionals (SVP-Health) in the Peruvian population. For this purpose, a cross-sectional study based on the two-stage administration of guided surveys and ROC (receiver operating characteristic) curve analysis was performed. Results: The study included 188 professionals from ten care centres in Peru. The professionals were divided into two groups of 94 subjects: those who had experienced PVW and those who had not. The average age of the participants was 36.8±10.5 years; their work experience ranged between one and 35 years; and 59% of the sample were women. According to an analysis based on the ROC curve, (a) there was a significant area under the curve (AUC=0.899) with adequate randomness; and (b) the SPV-Health adequately distinguished subjects with PVW from those without PVW (89% versus 94%).