Self-Efficacy for Managing Chronic Disease

This scale asks a person with a long-term health condition how confident they are that they can manage it. Not whether they know what to do, and not whether they are doing it — whether they believe they can. That belief predicts whether people actually take on self-management, which is why it appears as an outcome in so many chronic disease programs.

Six questions cover the areas common to most chronic conditions: keeping fatigue, physical discomfort, emotional distress, and other symptoms from interfering with what they want to do; doing things other than taking medication to reduce their symptoms; and reducing the need to see a doctor. Each is rated 1 for not at all confident to 10 for totally confident.

Licensing Notes: Distributed by the Self-Management Resource Center, which posts the scale free. Confirm with center before commercial use.

Learn More: The four domains it covers are symptom control, role function, emotional functioning, and communicating with physicians — deliberately chosen to be common across conditions rather than specific to one, which is what makes the same six items usable in arthritis, diabetes, heart failure, and cancer. Available in Spanish and German versions.