Designing and validating a measuring tool for the factors affecting the distribution of hospitals' intensive care beds in Iran

Background: Hospital services are the most expensive medical service in modern health care systems. Intense care beds, in particular, are more important. The present study was conducted to design and validate a measuring tool for the factors affecting the distribution of hospitals' intensive care beds in Iran. Methods: In this mixed method study, first, all known factors affecting the distribution of hospitals' intensive care beds were extracted by reviewing related literature. Then, all 60 confirmed items were categorized into different dimensions. Face validity and content validity of the questionnaire was done by 20 medical experts through qualitative and quantitative methods. Validity and reliability indices, content validity index (CVI), content validity ratio (CVR), and Cronbach's alpha were measured. SPSS software were used for data analysis and significance level was set at less than .05. Results: From the 60 suggested items, 34 were confirmed by the expert panels and all items had CVR and CVI scores higher than 0.83 and 0.81, respectively. CVR and CVI for all 34 items were 0.88 and 0.89, respectively. Also, Cronbach's alpha coefficient (0.75) indicated a suitable internal consistency. The value of S-CVI / Ave was also calculated to be 0.92. Conclusion: In this study, a valid tool was designed to identify the factors affecting the distribution of hospitals' intensive care beds. This tool consists of 6 dimensions: demographic, geographic, economic, sociopolitical, organizational, and constructional.