Development of the Palliative Care Nursing Self-competence Scale

Perceived nursing self-competence refers to nurses' judgment about their own capabilities to offer quality care. This self-assessment process promotes professional practice and competence development. However, instruments measuring this construct in the domain of palliative care show reliability and validity limitations. The main objective of this project was to develop a new instrument measuring perceived palliative care nursing self-competence. The development process involved three phases and several specific objectives. The objectives of Phase I were (1) to select dimensions representing palliative care nursing from a literature review, (2) to validate the construct and the dimensions with different experts, and (3) to generate a set of items for each dimension with palliative care experts. The objectives of Phase II were to (1) qualitatively and (2) quantitatively validate the content of the instrument using palliative care experts. The objectives of Phase III were (1) to pretest the formulation of the items with clinical nurses and (2) to reduce the item content of the instrument. Following a thorough development process that optimizes the content and minimizes measurement error, the Palliative Care Nursing Self-competence Scale was created. The initial version of the Palliative Care Nursing Self-competence Scale includes 10 dimensions and 50 items.