Patient Participation in Patient Safety Practices Scale: Development and Psychometric Evaluation of a Scale

Area of Science:

• Healthcare Quality and Safety
• Psychometric Scale Development
• Patient Engagement Strategies

Background:

• Patient participation is crucial for enhancing patient safety, improving communication, and reducing medical errors.
• Standardized instruments to measure patient engagement in safety practices are lacking.
• This study addresses the need for a validated tool to assess patient involvement in safety.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and psychometrically validate the Patient Participation in Patient Safety Practices Scale (PPPSPS).
• To create a reliable and valid instrument for measuring how patients engage in their own safety practices.
• To provide a tool for assessing patient participation across different safety domains.

Main Methods:

• Scale development involved item generation, expert review, pilot testing, and statistical validation with 424 inpatients.
• Content validity was assessed using Lawshe's content validity ratio (CVR).
• Structural validity was determined through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (EFA & CFA), with reliability assessed using Cronbach's alpha.

Main Results:

• The final 32-item PPPSPS has four subscales: general, infection, falls, and drugs.
• The scale demonstrated high internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.90 for the total scale).
• Factor analyses confirmed a robust structure, explaining 70.61% of the variance with good model fit indices.

Conclusions:

• The Patient Participation in Patient Safety Practices Scale (PPPSPS) is a valid and reliable instrument.
• The scale can be effectively used in clinical settings to measure patient engagement in safety practices.
• Further validation in diverse patient populations and healthcare systems is recommended.