Creating the Nurses’ Environmental Awareness Tool (NEAT)

Abstract

Acute care delivery creates secondary health risks to patients, health care workers, and the environment through a complex waste stream, intensive energy use, and frequent use of harmful chemicals. Nurses are among the most affected by these risks and are also pivotal change agents in reducing the negative impacts of health care delivery. Assessing nurses' understanding of health care-associated environmental health risks is essential if care is to be delivered in an environmentally safe and healthy manner, as indicated by published professional standards of nursing practice. However, psychometrically sound instruments that measure nurses' awareness of the environmental impacts of nursing practice are not available. To address this gap, a prototype of the Nurse's Environmental Awareness Tool (NEAT) was developed. Seven content experts in environmental health nursing and/or psychometrics were asked to review draft items. Comments were analyzed and applied to the scale items. Several revisions from the original item pool were made. The resulting draft NEAT includes six subscales, in three paired subsets. This article provides a summary of the process of item development and scale design. These findings, although preliminary, provide a foundation for subsequent psychometric testing. The result of this study is the creation of an instrument to measure nurses' awareness of and behaviors associated with the environmental impact of their practices.

Building a Leadership Culture for Environmental Health in a Nurse-Led Clinic

“…To evaluate the staff's baseline and post-intervention knowledge and behaviors of environmentalism in the workplace, the project leader used the Nurses' Environmental Awareness Tool [NEAT] (Schenk, Butterfield, & Postma, et al, 2015). This tool was adapted for the electronic Qualtrics platform (Qualtrics, 2016) (see Figure 1 for examples of questions).…”

“…This tool was adapted for the electronic Qualtrics platform (Qualtrics, 2016) (see Figure 1 for examples of questions). The NEAT consists of three sections: the Nurse Awareness Scale (knowledge), the Nurse Professional Ecological Behaviors Scale (behavior in the workplace), and the Personal Ecological Behaviors Scale (behavior at home) (Schenk et al, 2015). For the purpose of this project, the Personal Ecological Behaviors Scale section was not included in the pre-or post-intervention surveys.…”

“…and 2) "How related to health impacts do you think it is?" (Schenk et al, 2015). Participants ranked their level of knowledge using a one-to-five Likert scale such that 1 = "No, I have never heard of this before" and 5 = "Yes, I have definitely heard of this" (Schenk et al, 2015).…”

“…Participants ranked their level of knowledge using a one-to-five Likert scale such that 1 = "No, I have never heard of this before" and 5 = "Yes, I have definitely heard of this" (Schenk et al, 2015). They then ranked their beliefs about the prompt's relatedness to health impacts using the following one-to-five Likert scale: 1 = "never related;" and 5 = "always related" (Schenk et al, 2015).…”

“…(Schenk et al, 2015). Participants ranked their frequency of ecological behaviors at work using a one-to-five Likert scale as follows: 1 = "Never or almost never;" and 5 = "Always or almost always" (Schenk et al, 2015).…”