Validation of the Staff Attitudes to Nutritional Nursing Care Geriatric scale in Italian

To validate the Staff Attitudes to Nutritional Nursing Care Geriatric scale in Italian, a tool created in Sweden to measure nurses' attitudes towards nutritional care in older people.

Malnutrition in institutionalized older people is a serious problem having negative impact on patient outcomes. It is reported in the literature that nurses have negative attitudes towards nutritional care.

Forward and back-translation were carried out to build the Italian version of the tool. Content and face validity were then examined by pilot study. Test-retest reliability with Spearman's rho (rs) correlation, intraclass correlation (ICC) and internal consistency reliability with Cronbach's α were assessed. Differences between test-rest were assessed by t-test.

Linguistic and semantic adaptation of the tool into Italian was successful. Thirty-three nurses skilled in caring for older patients did pilot testing and 46 test-retesting. SANN-G GITA-scale achieved good content and face validity, good internal consistency reliability (Cronbach's α = 0.85) and acceptable stability [rs = 0.75, P = 0.001; ICC = 0.76, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.63-0.86; P = 0.001]. The t-test showed no significant difference between test and retest results, confirming stability of the tool (t(64) = -0.98; P = 0.33).

The process of adaptation of the scale from Swedish to Italian language was successful. Thus, the SANN-GITA scale can be useful to assess attitudes of nursing staff to nutritional care in the Italian context.

This tool will allow the identification of areas where Italian nurses have negative attitudes and where to implement strategies to improve overall nutritional care.