Adaptation and validation of the Turkish version of the alarm fatigue assessment questionnaire

Alarm fatigue may endanger the safety of patients by negatively affecting nurses' concentration and ability to provide effective care. Identifying alarm fatigue and taking appropriate measures are critical in preventing medical errors and for nurses to work with high motivation. This study aimed to test the psychometric properties of the Turkish version of the 23-item Alarm Fatigue Assessment Questionnaire (AFAQ).

The study was conducted between February 2022 and April 2022 and included nurses with at least one year of clinical or intensive care experience. The data were collected via a web-based questionnaire. During the adaptation of AFAQ, language, content, and construct validity were evaluated; reliability was examined by internal consistency analysis.

The item and scale content validity index of AFAQ were found to be high (>0.80). The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy indicated an adequate sampling (0.85); Bartlett's test of sphericity χ² was 1935.074, p<0.001. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) showed that the 21-item scale had a five-factor structure, explaining 51.606% of the total variance, and the factor loadings of the items were >0.30 (0.422-0.803). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) showed that the five-factor model had a good fit index (χ²/df=1.855, SRMR=0.039, RMSEA=0.048, CFI=0.915, and TLI=0.908) and appropriate factor loadings (>0.30). The internal consistency of AFAQ (Cronbach's alpha coefficient) was 0.85, and the corrected item-total correlations were between 0.32-0.55.

The results indicated that the Turkish version of the Alarm Fatigue Assessment Questionnaire was sufficiently valid and reliable to measure alarm fatigue in nurses.