Validation of the sinhala version of quality improvement nursing attitude scale

Abstract

Ensuring patient safety and quality care are very important aspects in health and social care globally. A lack of knowledge, attitudes, and skills towards quality improvement among health professionals has been identified as one of the major barriers to improving patient safety and quality care. Despite this, a gap remains in the literature regarding attitudes related to nurses’ quality improvement and safety in Sri Lanka. Furthermore, a validated Sinhala scale is not available to assess nurses’ attitudes towards quality improvement. Therefore, this study aimed to translate and validate the Sinhalese version of the Quality Improvement Nursing Attitude Scale (QINAS-SL). This instrument consists of 35 items and it is a convenient, inexpensive, easy to administer, and effective tool for assessing nurses' attitudes toward quality improvement. The method described in Braccialli et al. (2019) was used in the translation process which consisted of initial and reconciled translation from English into the Sinhala language, back-translation and instrument adaptation, equivalence analysis of the instrument items, pre-test and cultural adaptation stages. The final version of Sinhala tool was administered among 400 nurses recruited with multistage cluster sampling representing various categories of hospitals in the Central province including two tertiary care and two secondary care institutions. The content validity index (CVI) was 0.98, indicating acceptable validity, and Cronbach’s alpha reliability was 0.86, indicating acceptable internal consistency. Test-retest reliability was 0.86, indicating substantial reliability (ICC> 0.7). The eight-factor model explained 60.2% of the total variance. Therefore, QINAS-SL can serve as a valid, reliable, and practicable measurement tool for assessing the attitudes of nurses toward quality improvement.