Reliability and validity of Persian version of the nurses' willingness to engage in palliative care scale

Nurses play an essential role in providing palliative care to improve the quality of life of people with chronic diseases. The Willingness of nurses to engage in this cares is a necessary issue. Therefore, the evaluation of their willingness requires the use of valid, reliable, and suitable tools in the health system of Iran. This study was conducted to translate and validate the psychometric properties of the Persian version of the nurses' willingness to engage in the palliative care scale.

This methodological study was conducted in 2023. 440 nurses were included using the convenience sampling in Baqiyatallah Hospital in Tehran. The translation was done using the forward-backward method. Face validity was done with a cognitive interview with 15 clinical nurses. Content validity was done using the opinions of 15 palliative expert nurses, and construct validity was done using exploratory factor analysis (n = 240) and confirmatory factor analysis (n = 200). The reliability was done using internal consistency and assessment of stability. The data were analyzed using SPSS v.25 and LISREL v.8.8.

In the face validity assessment, the items did not change. Brief changes were made in items 8 and 18, in the content validity assessment. In the exploratory factor analysis, 4 factors same as the original version were extracted with a cumulative variance of 59.52%. The results of confirmatory factor analysis showed that the 4-factor model was fit (RMSEA = 0.062, CFI = 0.97, NFI = 0.93, IFI = 0.97, GFI = 0.88). The internal consistency using Cronbach's alpha was 0.9 also the stability was 0.79.

The Persian version of nurses' willingness to engage in palliative care scale has sufficient validity and reliability for nurses in the Iranian population. Therefore, this tool can be used to measure nurses' willingness to engage in the palliative care and identify effective strategies. This tool can be used in clinical trials and research in order to improve the ability of nurses in palliative care in Iranian society.