Psychometric properties of End-of-Life Caregiving Experience Appraisal Scale: Iranian critical care nurses

Background: Health care providers should be able to provide good quality end-of-life care. A tool to evaluate the positive and negative consequences of caring for dying patients is warranted.

Aim: The aim of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Persian version of the End-of-Life Caregiving Experience Appraisal Scale (EOLCAS).

Methods: This research was conducted in two phases. Phase I: The World Health Organization Protocol of forward-backward translation and an expert panel in order to determine face and content validity. Phase II: Survey development with 310 nurses who worked in critical care units, construct validity (construct, convergent and divergent validity), internal consistency (average inter-item correlation, Cronbach's alpha and McDonald's omega) and construct reliability were evaluated.

Results: The exploratory factor analysis showed that the present scale (Persian version) has four factors: Negative physical-emotional and social consequences, transcendental communication, information deficits and future rumination, which explained 83·92% of the overall extracted variance. Convergent and divergent validity were confirmed for all factors. The internal consistency and construct reliability were acceptable.

Conclusion: The scale has a multidimensional concept that is sufficiently reliable and the use of the scale would be helpful in measuring consequences of caring for dying patients.

Relevance to clinical practice: This scale makes a significant contribution in that it helps in the recognition of positive and negative consequences of critical care nurses' caring for dying patients.