Validity of Chinese Version of Attitudes Toward Interprofessional Health Care Teams Scale

Effective teamwork can provide safe and effective care in various medical systems. Thus, there is increasing recognition of the value of interprofessional collaborative practice. The Attitudes Toward Interprofessional Health Care Teams Scale (ATIHCTS) has been applied to a wide variety of health professions for evaluating attitudes toward health care teams. The ATIHCTS has been widely used internationally, but no Chinese version has been developed. The aim of this study was to adapt a Chinese version of the ATIHCTS among Chinese health care professionals and to test its validity.

The English version of the ATIHCTS was translated into Chinese, back-translated, and modified for cultural adaptation according to Brislin's guideline. A total of 306 health professionals in a Shanghai tertiary hospital were investigated using the Chinese version of the ATIHCTS to test its validity.

The Chinese version of the ATIHCTS was adjusted based on expert review and pilot testing. According to expert opinions, the text that did not conform to the Chinese language habits and the Chinese medical environment was adjusted. A total of five adjustments were made. After the pilot testing, minor corrections were made to improve the sentence structure of the scale instructions to make it easier to understand. Factor analysis was subsequently conducted with 306 respondents. The Chinese version of the ATIHCTS had 14 items. Exploratory factor analysis extracted two common factors, quality of care and time constraints, with the cumulative variance contribution rate reaching 70.011% and the load value of each entry on its common factor > 0.4. In addition, for scale confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), the chi-square/degrees of freedom ratio (X²/df) was 1.46, the normed fit index (NFI) was 0.97, the Tucker-Lewis index (TLI) was 0.99, the incremental fit index (IFI) was 0.99, the comparative fit index (CFI) was 0.99, and the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) was 0.04. The fitting values all met the judgment criteria, and the scale had good structural validity. Cronbach's α of the Chinese version of the ATIHCTS was 0.861, and the Cronbach's α values of each factor were 0.949 and 0.838, respectively. The split-half reliability was 0.644, and the Guttman split-half coefficients of each factor were 0.904 and 0.779, respectively.

The Chinese version of the ATIHCTS has good validity. It is a valuable tool for evaluating attitudes toward interprofessional health care teams among the health care professionals in China.