[Transcultural adaptation into Spanish of the nursing activities score]

Assessment of nursing workload is a common practice in the daily work of nursing care. This is usually done using scales that were not designed for Spanish-speaking countries, which may not take into account the characteristics of the environments that differ from one country to another. The Nursing Activities Score (NAS) has been described as being a useful tool for measuring nursing workload among the instruments used for this measurement in intensive care units.

It was aimed to adapt the NAS into Spanish for its use in Spanish intensive care units.

The NAS was adapted using translation-back translation method with the participation of both native English speakers who were bilingual in Spanish, and Spanish translators with a high level of English. All of the translators worked individually. A single Spanish version of the scale was obtained, after which a pilot test was made in an Intensive Care Major Burns Unit of the University Hospital of Getafe (Madrid, Spain) with 30 patients and 30 nurses during their regular work shift. We also consulted the primary author of the original description of the NAS regarding items that caused some kind of conflict.

Between the original scale and the result of the back-translations to English, we obtained agreement ratings of good in 73%, and appropriate in the remaining 27%. No item was considered to have bad correspondence.

We have developed a Spanish translation of the NAS that appears well matched to the original English version.