Development and reliability testing of the Scale for the Evaluation of Staff‐Patient Interactions in Progress Notes (SESPI): An assessment instrument of mental health nursing documentation

AIM: To develop and test the reliability of the Scale for the Evaluation of Staff‐Patient Interactions in Progress Notes (SESPI). Therapeutic nurse–patient interactions are fundamental in mental health nursing. However, little is known about how these interactions are recorded in nursing documentation and there is no instrument available for collecting this type of information for quantitative analysis. DESIGN: Instrument development and reliability testing. METHODS: The development of the SESPI was based on qualitative analyses of progress notes retrieved from patient records in two mental health services. A self psychological attunement perspective guided the analyses. SESPI was tested for internal consistency and inter‐rater reliability after 22 nurses independently scored 10 progress notes. RESULTS: Cronbach's alpha for the entire instrument was 0.977, indicating that the raters' scores had very high internal consistency. ICC was 0.770. The alpha and ICC values for each step were high, varying between 0.970 and 0.992.