Development and Evaluation of Psychometric Properties of a Chinese Version Questionnaire for Measuring Emergency Nursing Interruptions

Abstract

Nursing interruptions occur frequently and often have adverse outcomes, threatening patient safety. Emergency departments have a high incidence of nursing interruptions owing to the concentration of critically ill patients and frequent emergencies. Current research mainly focuses on large hospitals and uses observation and interview methods. Therefore, there is a need to develop tools for measuring emergency nursing interruptions. This study develops a survey questionnaire on emergency nursing interruptions. It tests its validity and reliability by building on the conceptual framework of emergency nursing interruption proposed in the literature. Specifically, we develop a test version of the emergency nursing interruption survey questionnaire using a Delphi expert inquiry and preinvestigation. We selected 1047 emergency nurses in 22 provinces and autonomous regions of China to participate in the survey by completing the questionnaire between June and July 2023 to evaluate the validity and reliability of the questionnaire. The final questionnaire comprised 26 items across 5 dimensions—sources, types, interrupted nursing activities, consequences of interrupted nursing activities, and management of nursing interruptions. The content validity indexes were 0.948 at scale level and 0.842–1.000 at item level. We used exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to extract five common factors with a cumulative variance contribution rate of 66.550%. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) demonstrated a good model fit. Cronbach’s α coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.912, split-half reliability was 0.846, and the retest reliability calculated using the intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.915. To ensure the structural validity of the scales, EFA and CFA were conducted using two different datasets. Thus, the questionnaire showed good validity and reliability and can be used to evaluate how nurses understand emergency nursing interruptions.