[Development of a scale for quality of care management process. A Delphi survey and studies on reliability and...

The purpose of this study was to develop a measurement tool for assessing quality in care management and to test its reliability and validity. A Delphi survey was initially administered on 96 experienced community health nurses, to improve the content validity of a questionnaire that was developed after three repeated rounds of data collection and content analysis. A total of 353 community health nurses, from 121 cities and towns across Japan, completed the mailed questionnaire. Cronbach's alpha value was more than 0.8, respectively, for all items in questionnaires, and for each factor, indicating internal consistency in reliability. Five factors were identified through factor analysis using a principal factor method with varimax rotation. These factors were good reflections of components classified by some researchers, indicating construct validity. In addition, care managers were grouped according to such criteria as their age and work experience. The QCM-P (Quality of Care Management-Process Measurement) score of each group was compared, as theoretically differences are expected. The questionnaire's validity was evidenced by significant differences in the QCM-P score among each group. Further studies on criterion-related validity and stability which relates to reliability are required. Thus, although further work is needed, QCM-P was found to have both reliability and validity at a permissible level as a scale for measuring the quality of care management process.