Development and testing of the Pediatric Nurses' Knowledge and Attitudes Survey Regarding Pain

The Pediatric Nurses' Knowledge and Attitudes Survey Regarding Pain (PNKAS) is a modification of Ferrell and McCaffery's Nurses' Knowledge and Attitudes Survey Regarding Pain (NKAS) (1997). The survey was modified for use with pediatric nurses. Following these modifications, five national content experts in pain management rated the relevance of the items to establish content validity. Using data from 12 subjects, test-retest reliability of the tool was found to be r = 0.67, indicating an acceptable level of stability. The Cronbach's alpha was 0.72 from the responses of 247 pediatric nurses working in a large children's hospital and 0.77 using the responses from 88 members of a pediatric nursing specialty organization, indicating an acceptable level of internal consistency. In keeping with the new standards from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organization (JCAHO), it is recommended that the PNKAS be used to evaluate pediatric nurses' competency in pain management.