Re-Visiting the Content Validity of the Manchester Clinical Supervision Scale (MCSS-26)

Clinical supervision is widely regarded as an important part of both pre-graduate and post-registration education and training of healthcare professionals. To ensure comprehensive implementation of effective supervision practices, it is crucial that supervisors, healthcare organisations and researchers have valid and reliable instruments to measure these practices. The Manchester Clinical Supervision Scale (MCSS) is the most widely used instrument for measuring supervision effectiveness in nursing and allied health. According to the developers of MCSS, it is based on Proctor's three functions of supervision as being normative, formative and restorative. The purpose of this paper was to report a test of the content validity of MCSS-26, which is the latest version. Methods included: 1. A qualitative text analysis of MCSS-26's syntax and wording. 2. A Content Validity Index with an expert panel rating the relevance of MCSS-26 items for measuring effectiveness of supervision and their clarity. 3. A linguistic reordering of items and a tabulation of panel classifications of MCSS-26 items according to Proctor's three functions. Findings revealed heterogeneity in MCSS-26's wording and an uneven flow with negative/general questions being frontloaded. The CVI identified 46% of items (n = 12/26) as relevant for directly or indirectly measuring effectiveness of clinical supervision. The expert panel was not able to consistently link items to Proctor's functions. The results have important implications for how to interpret MCSS-26 ratings of effectiveness of clinical supervision and can be used to consider psychometric studies examining the potential for an abbreviated version of MCSS-26 with a single focus on effectiveness.