Influence of sleep quality on aggressive behaviours: Predictive validity of the Brøset Violence Checklist-revised

Violent behaviours in acute psychiatric settings represent a critical issue within health systems. Prompt identification of patients at risk is a priority for nurses. The Brøset Violence Checklist (BVC), created to support nursing assessment, showed good psychometric skills; a new version of the instrument (BVC_rev), including sleep alterations, seems to improve the predictivity of sleep compared to the original scale but is not available in Italian.

To evaluate the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Brøset Violence Checklist revised (BVC_ita-rev).

This was a prospective, observational study. After back-translation and content validity assessment, the BVC_ita and BVC_ita-rev were used simultaneously for risk assessment on a sample of patients admitted to the psychiatric inpatient wards of two Italian hospitals. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and ROC curve were calculated for both BVC_ita and BVC_ita-rev.

137 patients were enrolled, and 1117 evaluations were performed. Thirty-four subjects (24.82 %) engaged in aggressive actions during hospitalization, 24 of whom more than once. The predictivity of BVC_ita-rev was higher than that of BVC_ita (ROC = 0.9528 vs 0.8811). The S-CVI of the new version of the instrument was = 0.92.

Including an item addressing sleep disturbances enhances the predictive capabilities of the BVC_ita-rev. This modified version of the BVC proves to be an effective tool for supporting nurses in the short-term assessment of violence risk within acute psychiatric inpatient settings.