Developing the personal protective equipment comfort scale

ABSTRACT This is a methodological, cross-sectional descriptive study designed with the purpose of developing a valid and reliable measurement instrument allowing determination of the Comfort of PPE used by healthcare workers. The draft scale which was reduced to 20 items after content validity analysis was prepared as a 5-point Likert-type scale and applied to 502 volunteering healthcare workers employed at state, university and private hospitals in the province of Istanbul in Turkey. The scale was tested for validity and reliability. Internal consistency and test-retest reliability analyses were used to assess reliability, exploratory factor analysis was conducted with the SPSS software, and confirmatory factor analysis was conducted with the Lisrel software. As a result of the analyses, a 20-item scale consisting of 3 dimensions and explaining 63.14% of the total variance was developed. The Cronbach’s α value for the entire scale was determined as 0.93. For test-retest reliability, the scale was applied again on the same group with a two-week interval, and the correlation coefficient was found significant. The three-factor construct was confirmed with the confirmatory factor analysis. The PPE Comfort Scale may be used in a group of healthcare workers as a valid and reliable instrument.