• Abdulellah Al Thobaity, Brett Williams, and Virginia Plummer.
• School of Nursing & Midwifery, Monash University, Australia; College of Applied Medical Science, Taif University, Saudi Arabia.
• Australas Emerg Nurs J. 2016 Feb 1; 19 (1): 11-9.

BackgroundAll nurses must have core competencies in preparing for, responding to and recovering from a disaster. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), as in many other countries, disaster nursing core competencies are not fully understood and lack reliable, validated tools. Thus, it is imperative to develop a scale for exploring disaster nursing core competencies, roles and barriers in the KSA.ObjectivesThis study's objective is to develop a valid, reliable scale that identifies and explores core competencies of disaster nursing, nurses' roles in disaster management and barriers to developing disaster nursing in the KSA.MethodsThis study developed a new scale testing its validity and reliability. A principal component analysis (PCA) was used to develop and test psychometric properties of the new scale. The PCA used a purposive sample of nurses from emergency departments in two hospitals in the KSA. Participants rated 93 paper-based, self-report questionnaire items from 1 to 10 on a Likert scale. PCA using Varimax rotation was conducted to explore factors emerging from responses.FindingsThe study's participants were 132 nurses (66% response rate). PCA of the 93 questionnaire items revealed 49 redundant items (which were deleted) and 3 factors with eigenvalues of >1. The remaining 44 items accounted for 77.3% of the total variance. The overall Cronbach's alpha was 0.96 for all factors: 0.98 for Factor 1, 0.92 for Factor 2 and 0.86 for Factor 3.ConclusionsThis study provided a validated, reliable scale for exploring nurses' core competencies, nurses' roles and barriers to developing disaster nursing in the KSA. The new scale has many implications, such as for improving education, planning and curricula.Crown Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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