Nurses’ attitudes toward nursing sensitive indicators: An online survey in Australia

International Conference on Nursing & Emergency Medicine

December 02-04, 2013 Hampton Inn Tropicana, Las Vegas, NV, USA

XiaoquanXu, Liza Heslop and Lucy Lu

Scientific Tracks Abstracts: J Nurs Care

Abstract :

Nursing sensitive indictors (NSIs) can provide standardized numerical information to evaluate nursing interventions, implement quality improvement initiatives, and make decision about nurse staffing. However, in Australia, there are no national NSIs and nurses? attitudes toward NSIs are not clear. This survey aims to identify the NSIs that nurses consider to be sensitive to nursing care or its outcomes. An online survey was conducted with 2682 nursing staff in an Australian metropolitan public health service. Data was collected by a questionnaire including 40 NSIs synthesized by the concept analysis of NSIs. With a response rate of 9.1%, raking ratio estimation was applied to weigh the results back to the overall nursing staff population. The construct validity and reliability of the questionnaire were tested respectively with exploratory factor analysis and Cronbach?s alpha test. The percentage of the agreement of each NSI was counted for identifying NSIs. Moreover, the correlations between nurses? attitudes and their demographic characteristics were assessed with Spearman?s rank-order correlation. Three factors representing different domains of NSIs were identified. Reliability estimates of the overall survey and the items within three factors were satisfactory (α>0.9). The percentages of the agreement of NSIs ranged from 93.5% to 47.6%. Assessment of patient care requirement, nursing staff experience and ratio of total nursing staff to patients were identified as the three highest agreed NSIs. In addition, there were positive correlations between the nurses? attitudes and working experience, nursing role and qualification (P≤0.01). The findings revealed the most significant NSIs for Australian public health. It may provide implications for the identification of NSIs in Australia.

Biography :

Xiaoquan Xu is a final-year Ph.D. candidate from Victoria University, Australia. Prior to her Ph.D. study, she has worked as a professional editor and served as the manager of an Editorial House for about ten years in Wenzhou Medical College, China. She has published 16 articles in peerreviewed journals.