Venous leg ulceration has a high recurrence rate. Patients with healed or frequently recurring venous ulceration are required to perform self-care behaviours to prevent recurrence or promote healing, but many find these difficult to perform. Bandura’s self-efficacy theory is a widely used and robust behaviour change model and underpins many interventions designed to promote self-care in a variety of chronic conditions. By identifying areas where patients may experience difficulty in performing self-care, interventions can be developed to strengthen their self-efficacy beliefs in performing these activities successfully. There are currently a variety of self-efficacy scales available to measure self-efficacy in a variety of conditions; but not a disease-specific scale for use with venous ulcer patients. The aim of this study, therefore, was to develop a disease-specific, patient-focused self-efficacy scale for patients with healed venous leg ulceration. Phase 1 consisted of a qualitative design and used focus group methodology to generate an item pool for potential inclusion into the scale from the patients’ perspective. In phase 2, factor analysis using equamax orthogonal rotation methods was used to reduce the items from 60 to 30, resulting in 5 major domains: general self-care; daily self-care tasks; normal living; developing expertise and avoiding trauma. Preliminary reliability studies indicated that the developed scale, VeLUSET© has good internal consistency, with an overall Cronbach alpha of .929 and a strong test-re-test reliability. Furthermore, correlation with the General Self-Efficacy Scale demonstrated a strong positive relationship between the two scales. These results indicate that the VeLUSET©, although still in the early validation stages, is a reliable instrument to measure venous leg ulcer patients’ self-efficacy in performing self-care tasks within clinical practice. The development of this disease-specific tool has now filled a gap in the research on managing patients with healed venous leg ulceration.

No / High compression therapy, whether with bandage systems or hosiery, is the accepted treatment of lower limb venous ulceration. Compression has not only been shown to improve healing, it has been demonstrated to reduce oedema and improve tissue oxygen levels (Stacey et al, 1990), reversing some of the changes associated with chronic venous insufficiency (Vandongen and Stacey, 2000). The introduction of multilayer high compression bandage systems in the late 1980s, and subsequent improvements in bandage textiles and design, have undoubtedly improved outcomes for many patients. However, compression alone does not address the underlying pathology of venous ulceration, chronic venous insufficiency (CVI), and without treatment CVI continues to cause skin damage and increases the risk of recurrent ulceration. In 1999, Nelzen emphasised that compression treatment has been used since the days of Hippocrates and yet has not solved the problem of leg ulceration (Nelzen, 1999).