Validation of the Practice Environment Scale to Brazilian Culture

Purpose: the professional practice environment is defined as a system with characteristics that favor or difficult the development of nurse activities. Among the instruments to assess the presence of such characteristics, the Practice Environment Scale stands out. It is comprised of 31 items distributed into five subscales, thus the objective of the present study was to assess the validity and reliability of the Brazilian version of the Practice Environment Scale.

Methods: methodological study carried out in two hospitals in Brazil. The study was conducted in the period from June to August 2014. For data collection, we used: the Brazilian version of the Practice Environment Scale, the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire – Short Form 2006 and the Maslach Burnout Inventory. Correlations were analyzed by means of Spearman’s correlation coefficient and factorial analysis through the Structural Equation Modeling.

Results: the sample was composed of 209 nurses. The factor analysis resulted in the exclusion of three items from the subscale “nursing foundations for quality of care” (14, 26 and 31) and four items from the subscale “nurse participation in hospital affairs” (5, 11, 15 and 27). The composite reliability was considered acceptable for all subscales. Significant correlations were obtained between the subscales of the instrument and all variables under study. In the comparison of the studied groups, the accredited hospital achieved significant higher means in all subscales when compared to the hospital that does not have a certification label, demonstrating a better environment for professional practice.

Conclusion: the Brazilian version of the Practice Environment Scale is a valid and reliable tool to evaluate the presence of characteristics that favor the nurse professional practice. It is important to make available a scale with recognized validity and reliability for use in the nursing management and research, because its use might contribute to the implementation of actions that favor the construction of an environment with characteristics that favor nursing professional practice.