Abstract:Objective To explore the development of a preoperative frailty assessment scale for liver transplant recipients and test its reliability and validity preoperatively, so as to provide a methodological reference for the effective management of preoperative frailty in liver transplant recipients. Methods Based on literature research and panel discussion, the scale item pool was preliminarily formulated.The first draft of the preoperative frailty assessment scale for liver transplant recipients was constructed through the Delphi method of expert consultation. A small sample of 30 preoperative liver transplantation patients was selected by convenience sampling method to test the clinical applicability of the scale. A total of 160 patients before liver transplantation in the Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University from September 2022 to June 2023 were investigated with the first draft of the scale. SPSS 25.0 was used to analyze the data and calculate the reliability and validity of the scale. Results The preoperative frailty assessment scale for liver transplant recipients included 26 items, and exploratory factor analysis extracted 5 common factors which were disease symptoms, physiological status, health information, social participation, and psychology sentiments, with a cumulative variance contribution of 62.03%. The scale-content validity index was 0.923, and the item-content validity index was 0.857 to 1.000. Scale internal consistency Cronbach's α coefficients, Spearman-Brown split half confidence coefficients, and retest reliability were 0.851, 0.774, and 0.865, respectively. Conclusion The preoperative frailty assessment scale developed in this study demonstrates strong reliability and validity, and has a certain application value for evaluating preoperative frailty level of clinical liver transplant recipients.