Measuring hospital staff nurses perception on quality of the professional practice environment

The purpose of this study was to determine construct validity of the Dutch Essentials of Magnetism II © instrument, designed to assess nursing practice environments, using hypotheses testing.

Reduction in hospital length of stay and the number of inpatient beds increases care intensity. Educational levels and numbers of nursing staff in hospitals, however, do not match this increase, resulting in a strain on quality of care and patient safety. A possible answer to existing concerns about quality of care may be the creation of a productive and healthy practice environment, as this has an impact on the quality of care. Therefore, areas requiring improvement of the practice environment have to be defined.

A cross-sectional, correlational study design.

We determined construct validity with hypotheses testing by relating the Dutch Essentials of Magnetism II to the Dutch Practice Environment Scale of the Nursing Work Index. We formulated 15 hypotheses prior to data-analysis; 10 related to convergent validity and five related to discriminant validity. Data were collected from qualified nurses (N = 259) on nine randomly selected hospital wards from March to April 2012.

Response rate was 47% (n = 121). Total scores of both instruments are strongly correlated (r = 0·88). In total, 12 of 15 hypotheses (80%) were confirmed and three were rejected.

The D-EOMII has satisfactory construct validity for measuring the nursing practice environment in hospitals and can be used by nurses, managers, health policy makers, hospitals and governments to assess and identify processes and relationships that are in need of improvement.