Development and validation of the Scale for Staff-Family Partnership in Long-term Care (SSFPLC)

Abstract

Background: A partnership between staff and families is crucial to maintain nursing home residents' health and promote quality of care, and currently, there is a need for a measurement tool to assess the partnership.

Objectives: This study aimed to develop a tool for assessing the partnership between staff and the families of older adult nursing home residents from the perspective of staff members and to verify its reliability and validity.

Methods: The instrument was developed in the following four stages: (1) generation of an item pool via literature review and focus group interview, (2) experts' content validity analysis of 32 items, (3) a preliminary survey on 30 staff members and (4) validity and reliability tests of the instrument on 346 staff members in nursing homes between July and October 2018.

Results: The final instrument consists of 17-items in four categories (family's trust and support, collaborative relationship and communication, encouragement to participate in care and professional care). Each item was rated on a 4-point Likert scale, and the higher scores indicating better partnership between staff and families of nursing home residents. The reliability of the instrument was 0.90, and the test-retest intra-class correlation coefficient was 0.96.

Conclusion: The Scale for Staff-Family Partnership in Long-term Care (SSFPLC) showed acceptable reliability and validity as an instrument to assess the partnership between nursing home staff and families.

Implications for practice: This tool can be used for evaluating staff and family partnerships within nursing homes.