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.