Purpose: Patient empowerment is a fundamental goal of health care and nursing. For reaching this goal, empowering patient education is needed. In this study, our purpose is to develop and test a new instrument for evaluating nurses’ competence for empowering patient education (INCompEPE) due to the lack of such instrument (Lin & Wang 2016). In this presentation, we describe the development process of the instrument and the main psychometric indicators.
Methods: A cross sectional methodological design is used. Instrument of nurses’ competence in empowering patient education (INCompEPE) was developed in 2018–2019 based on a metasummary of empowering discourse in patient education (Virtanen et al. 2007), studies on empowering patient education (e.g. Klemetti et al. 2005, Tveiten & Meyer 2009, Nygårdh et al. 2011), approaches to learning (Marton & Säljö 2005). Content validity was evaluated with an expert panel.
INCompEPE is designed for nurses’ self-evaluation. The 84-item instrument consisted of two main domains: realization (38 items) and content (46 items) of empowering patient education. Realization consists of items on three areas of the structure of empowering patient education (initiation, progress and conclusion, Virtanen et al. 2007). Content consists of items on six dimensions of empowering knowledge (biophysiological, functional, social, experiential, ethical and financial, Klemetti et al. 2005). Both realization and content will be evaluated on VAS-scale from 1 to 10.
Psychometrics of INCompEPE is evaluated in the fall of 2019. First, the instrument is piloted by 100 nurses on a surgical ward in one university hospital in southern Finland. Second, the instrument will be tested by 1000 health care professionals in one hospital in southwestern Finland. The data from the studies are analyzed to evaluate internal consistency and construct validity. After validation, INCompEPE is used in the intervention study of nurses’ competence in empowering patient education.
Results: Results and psychometric properties are available in the beginning of the year 2020.
Conclusion: The instrument INCompEPE will improve the identification of nurses’ needs for continuing education of empowering patient education and steers creating content areas of continuing education. The instrument is also applicable in nursing education and developing of teaching and learning of empowering patient education.