Nursing activities score: a comparative study about retrospective and prospective applications in intensive care units

Objectives: To analyze the performance of the Nursing Activities Score (NAS) to measure the prospective nursing work-load in Intensive Care Units (ICU) and to compare the NAS values obtained in prospective and retrospective applications of the instrument, in addition to verifying the degree of concordance in the items that comprise it applied prospectively and retrospectively. Methods: NAS was applied prospectively and retrospectively Student's t, Pearson's coefficient and Intra-class correlation (ICC) were used to verify correlation and homogeneity For agreement between each item, the Kappa coefficient was used. Results: There were differences (p < 0.001) between the prospective and retrospective NAS averages (Pearson 0.65 and ICC 0.623). Kappa was not applied to 11 items due to the high percentage of agreement in a single response category. Ten items (47.6%) had agreements equal or higher than moderate. Items with very strong and strong agreement refer to objective data that usually do not present: disagreements. Items with sub-items had lower agreements. Conclusions: Prospective NAS performed well in measuring nursing work-load at die ICU.