Research lessons from implementing a national nursing workforce study.

Area of Science:

• Health Policy
• Nursing Workforce Development
• Health Services Research

Background:

• National nursing workforce studies are vital for evidence-based policymaking to enhance global nursing resources.
• Survey instrument translation and adaptation are critical for successful health workforce studies, especially in new contexts.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe the pre-data collection instrument adaptation challenges during Poland's first national nursing workforce study.
• To address challenges within the Nurse Forecasting: Human Resources Planning in Nursing project.

Main Methods:

• Descriptive analysis of the pre-data collection phase.
• A two-phase content validity indexing process and pilot testing were used for instrument adaptation.
• Content validation phase means were compared with pilot study results.

Main Results:

• Initial instrument review revealed poor cross-cultural relevance and translation issues.
• Revision and re-evaluation significantly improved instrument scores.
• Pilot testing identified floor and ceiling effects on relevance score correlations.

Conclusions:

• The study developed a novel cross-cultural adaptation process for national nursing workforce studies.
• This rigorous adaptation improved data integrity, comparability, and resource efficiency.
• The approach is recommended for future cross-cultural instrument adaptation in similar studies.