Nursing Intensive-Care Satisfaction Scale [NICSS]: Development and validation of a patient-centred instrument

The aim of this study was to develop and validate the Nursing Intensive-Care Satisfaction Scale to measures satisfaction with nursing care from the critical care patient's perspective.

Instruments that measure satisfaction with nursing cares have been designed and validated without taking the patient's perspective into consideration. Despite the benefits and advances in measuring satisfaction with nursing care, none instrument is specifically designed to assess satisfaction in intensive care units.

Instrument development.

The population were all discharged patients (January 2013 - January 2015) from three Intensive Care Units of a third level hospital (N = 200). All assessment instruments were given to discharged patients and 48 hours later, to analyse the temporal stability, only the questionnaire was given again. The validation process of the scale included the analysis of internal consistency, temporal stability; validity of construct through a confirmatory factor analysis; and criterion validity.

Reliability was 0.95. The intraclass correlation coefficient for the total scale was 0.83 indicating a good temporal stability. Construct validity showed an acceptable fit and factorial structure with four factors, in accordance with the theoretical model, being Consequences factor the best correlated with other factors. Criterion validity, presented a correlation between low and high (range: 0.42-0.68).

The scale has been designed and validated incorporating the perspective of critical care patients. Thanks to its reliability and validity, this questionnaire can be used both in research and in clinical practice. The scale offers a possibility to assess and develop interventions to improve patient satisfaction with nursing care.