Evaluating hospital postnatal nursing care: development of the instruments

Measures of the quality of hospital postnatal nursing care were developed for an evaluative study of the benefits of combined mother-infant versus traditional separate staffing patterns. Two hundred mothers completed instruments designed to measure maternal competence, patient satisfaction, establishment of breast-feeding in hospital and breast-feeding success at 6 weeks, and 28 nursing staff completed measures of staff satisfaction. The internal consistency and test-retest reliability of scales were supported by alpha coefficients of .60 to .89 and correlation coefficients of .74 to .80. A 90% participation rate and a 97% completion rate were achieved for the maternal sample. Evidence is presented for instrument content, construct, and predictive validity.