Creating the Nurses' Environmental Awareness Tool (NEAT)

Acute care delivery creates secondary health risks to patients, health care workers, and the environment through a complex waste stream, intensive energy use, and frequent use of harmful chemicals. Nurses are among the most affected by these risks and are also pivotal change agents in reducing the negative impacts of health care delivery. Assessing nurses' understanding of health care-associated environmental health risks is essential if care is to be delivered in an environmentally safe and healthy manner, as indicated by published professional standards of nursing practice. However, psychometrically sound instruments that measure nurses' awareness of the environmental impacts of nursing practice are not available. To address this gap, a prototype of the Nurse's Environmental Awareness Tool (NEAT) was developed. Seven content experts in environmental health nursing and/or psychometrics were asked to review draft items. Comments were analyzed and applied to the scale items. Several revisions from the original item pool were made. The resulting draft NEAT includes six subscales, in three paired subsets. This article provides a summary of the process of item development and scale design. These findings, although preliminary, provide a foundation for subsequent psychometric testing. The result of this study is the creation of an instrument to measure nurses' awareness of and behaviors associated with the environmental impact of their practices.