• J Clin Nurs · Oct 2009

    The validity and reliability of an instrument to assess nursing competencies in spiritual care.

    • René van Leeuwen, Lucas J Tiesinga, Berrie Middel, Doeke Post, and Henk Jochemsen.
    • Department of Nursing, Ede Christian University, Ede, The Netherlands. rrvleeuwen@che.nl
    • J Clin Nurs. 2009 Oct 1;18(20):2857-69.

    AimThis study contributes to the development of a valid and reliable instrument, the spiritual care competence scale, as an instrument to assess nurses' competencies in providing spiritual care.BackgroundMeasuring these competencies and their development is important and the construction of a reliable and valid instrument is recommended in the literature.DesignSurvey.MethodThe participants were students from Bachelor-level nursing schools in the Netherlands (n = 197) participating in a cross-sectional study. The items in the instrument were hypothesised from a competency profile regarding spiritual care. Construct validity was evaluated by factor analysis and internal consistency was estimated with Cronbach's alpha and the average inter-item correlation. In addition, the test-retest reliability of the instrument was determined at a two-week interval between baseline and follow-up (n = 109).ResultsThe spiritual care competence scale comprises six spiritual-care-related nursing competencies. These domains were labelled: 1 assessment and implementation of spiritual care (Cronbach's alpha 0.82) 2 professionalisation and improving the quality of spiritual care (Cronbach's alpha 0.82) 3 personal support and patient counseling (Cronbach's alpha 0.81) 4 referral to professionals (Cronbach's alpha 0.79) 5 attitude towards the patient's spirituality (Cronbach's alpha 0.56) 6 communication (Cronbach's alpha 0.71). These subscales showed good homogeneity with average inter-item correlations >0.25 and a good test-retest reliability.ConclusionThis study conducted in a nursing-student population demonstrated valid and reliable scales for measuring spiritual care competencies. The psychometric quality of the instrument proved satisfactory. This study does have some methodological limitations that should be taken into account in any further development of the spiritual care competence scale.Relevance To Clinical PracticeThe spiritual care competence scale can be used to assess the areas in which nurses need to receive training in spiritual care and can be used to assess whether nurses have developed competencies in providing spiritual care.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…