The Chinese Version of the Palliative Nursing Care Quality Scale: Translation, Cross-Cultural Adaptation, and Validity.

Abstract

Background: Nurses play an important role in palliative care, and high-quality assessment tools can help standardize palliative-related nursing behaviors, but there are no such tools in China.

Objective: This study aimed to revise, cross-culturally adapt, and validate the Palliative Nursing Care Quality Scale (PNCQS) to provide an effective tool that can help nurses in mainland China assess the quality of palliative care.

Methods: This study involved a 2-steps process. First, the PNCQS was translated, back-translated, and cross-cultural adapted using Brislin's translation model. Second, a cross-sectional study was used to evaluate the reliability and validity of the revised scale. From January to February 2023, 367 nurses engaged in palliative care-related nursing from 3 tertiary A general hospitals were surveyed with the revised scale. The evaluation methods used in this study included item analysis, test-retest reliability, internal consistency, criterion-related validity, content validity, and construct validity.

Results: The PNCQS-Chinese included 20 items. In this study, the item-total correlation coefficients ranged from 0.67 to 0.83 (P < .01), and the critical ratio value of the items was 12.10 to 23.34 (P < .01). The scale-level content validity index was 0.98, and the item-level content validity ranged from 0.86 to 1.00. The total Cronbach's α and test-retest reliability of the scale were 0.96 and 0.79, respectively. Factor analysis of 20 items extracted 1 factor, and the contribution rate of cumulative variance was 60.03%.

Conclusions: PNCQS-Chinese shows acceptable validity and reliability for assessing the quality of palliative care-related nursing in mainland China.