Palliative care and spiritual care competency measurement among Turkish Nurses: A scale adaptation study

Objectives. This study aimed to conduct a Turkish validity and reliability study of the Palliative Care Spiritual Care Competency Scale. Methods. The sample of the study consisted of 354 nurses. In the first stage, the forward-backward translation method was used to develop the Turkish version of the Palliative Care Spiritual Care Competency Scale. The comprehensibility, purposefulness, cultural appropriateness, and discrimination of the scale items were evaluated with content validity. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was applied to examine the construct validity of the scale. To evaluate the ability of the scale to give consistent results at different time intervals, the relationship between the scores obtained from the first and second applications was examined with the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). The reliability of the scale was evaluated with the Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient and item-total score correlation coefficients. Results. The content validity index of the Palliative Care Spiritual Care Competency Scale was found to be 0.98 after expert opinion was obtained. The goodness-of-fit values of the scale were chi(2)/sd: 3.125; GFI: 0.915; AGFI: 0.875; IFI: 0.926; TLI: 0.905; CFI: 0.925; RMSEA: 0.078; SRMR: 0.054. As a result of CFA, some items were removed from the scale, and a Turkish version of the scale consisting of 14 items and three sub-dimensions was developed. The reliability of the scale over time was evaluated with the test-retest method, and it was found that the inter-response agreement was very good (ICC: 0.981; p < 0.001). The Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient of the scale was 0.89 and the Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficient of the subscales ranged between 0.78 and 0.85. Significance of results. It was determined that the Turkish version of the Palliative Care Spiritual Care Competency Scale is a short, easy-to-understand, and psychometrically sound measurement tool that can be safely applied to Turkish nurses.