Preliminary construction of Disaster Nursing Capacity Assessment Scale for Emergency Nurses and its reliability and validity

Objective To construct a Disaster Nursing Capacity Assessment Scale for Emergency Nurses suitable for hospital culture in China. Methods The initial scale was designed with the methods of literature review and Delphi expert consultation. From June to December 2017, totals of 272 nurses from Emergency Department at two ClassⅢ Grade A hospitals in Shanghai were selected by convenient sampling to carry out test. Item analysis and factor analysis were used to develop the formal scale. Finally, this study evaluated the reliability and validity of the scale. Results The Cronbach's α coefficients of all items were higher than 0.900 and the total Cronbach's αcoefficient was 0.990; the test-retest reliability was 0.946; items had associations with the total score with statistical differences (r=0.530-0.870, P<0.01) . Principal component analysis extracted 4 initial factors with 76.56% for the cumulative variance contribution rate. Conclusions The Disaster Nursing Capacity Assessment Scale for Emergency Nurses has good reliability and validity which can be an assessment tool for disaster nursing capacity of emergency nurses. Key words: Emergency service, hospital; Nurses; Disaster; Scale; Reliability and validity test