Development and psychometric testing of Perceived Preoperative Nursing Care Competence Scale for Nursing Students (PPreCC-NS)

For nurses to carry out their responsibilities related to preoperative care in the best possible way, it is very important for them to receive competency-based training and for their competences to be measured with reliable and valid tools in the training process.To develop a measurement tool that evaluates nursing students' perceived competence for preoperative nursing care.A cross-sectional, methodological study.Two universities in the Eastern Black Sea Region of Turkey.A total of 661 second, third and fourth grade nursing students participated in the study.Items were created in line with the nursing competencies published by the International Council of Nurses, the competencies in the perioperative period nursing practices published by the European Operating Room Nurses Association, and a review of the literature. Then, to test the content validity, the items were submitted for expert opinion and a pilot implementation was made with 50 nursing students. Furthermore, the construct validity of the scale was tested with exploratory factor analysis (n = 253) and confirmatory factor analysis (n = 350). Test-retest stability was also investigated for the PPreCC-NS (n = 58), in the study.According to the results of the exploratory factor analysis, the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin value was 0.948, and the Bartlett test χ2 was 7765.23; p < 0.001. Three items with a factor loading value below 0.50 were removed from the scale, and the obtained factor structure explained 62.25 % of the variance. The fit indices of the scale model tested in the confirmatory factor analysis were determined as χ2/df = 2.74, RMSEA = 0.07, CFI = 0.92, GFI = 0.88, AGFI = 0.85, IFI = 0.92. The structure of the draft scale was confirmed with 5 factors and 22 items. The Cronbach alpha values were found to be 0.79-0.96 for the sub-dimensions of the scale and 0.94 for the total scale. Data also showed a good test-retest stability (ICC = 0.72).This scale is a reliable and valid measurement tool for nursing students to determine their level of perceived competence for preoperative nursing care. It is recommended that the psychometric structure of the scale be evaluated with further studies on larger and more diverse samples.