Development, reliability and validity of infectious disease specialist Nurse’s Core competence scale

Abstract Aim This study aims to develop an instrument to measure infectious disease specialist nurses’ core competence and examining the scale’s validity and reliability. Background With the increase of infectious diseases, more and more attention has been paid to infectious disease nursing care. The core competence of the infectious disease specialist nurses is directly related to the quality of nursing work. In previous researches, infectious disease specialist nurses’ core competence was measured by the tools developed for general nurses instead of specialized tools, which made it difficult to clarify the core competence of nurses in infectious diseases department. Methods Preliminary items were developed through literature review, theoretical research, qualitative interview and Delphi method. The confirmed 47 items were applied in the two rounds of data collection. Evaluation data on 516 infectious disease specialist nurses’ core competence in the first round were utilized to preliminarily evaluate and explore the scale’s constrution, while evaluation data on 497 infectious disease specialist nurses’ core competence in the second round were utilized to do reliability analysis and validity analysis. In this study, factor analysis, Cronbach’s α, Pearson correlation coefficients were all adopted. Results The final scale is composed of 34 items and 5 factors, and adopted the 5-point scoring method. The factors are Professional Development Abilities, Infection Prevention and Control Abilities, Nursing Abilities for Infectious Diseases, Professionalism and Humanistic Accomplishment, and Responsiveness to Emergency Infectious Diseases. The explanatory variance of the five factors was 75.569%. The reliability and validity of the scale is well validated. The internal consistency, split-half reliability and test-retest reliability were 0.806, 0.966 and 0.831 respectively. The scale has good structural validity and content validity. The content validity was 0.869. Discrimination analysis showed that there were significant differences in the scores of core competence and its five dimensions among infectious disease specialist nurses of different ages, working years in infectious diseases, titles, educational background, marital status and wages (all P  < 0.05). Conclusions The proposed scale takes on high reliability and validity, and is suitable for assessing the infectious disease specialist nurses’ core competence. Relevance to clinical practice This scale provides a reference for clinical assessment of infectious disease nursing.