Development and validation of the Scale for Staff–Family Partnership in Long‐term Care (SSFPLC)

BACKGROUND: A partnership between staff and families is crucial to maintain nursing home residents' health and promote quality of care, and currently, there is a need for a measurement tool to assess the partnership. OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to develop a tool for assessing the partnership between staff and the families of older adult nursing home residents from the perspective of staff members and to verify its reliability and validity. METHODS: The instrument was developed in the following four stages: (1) generation of an item pool via literature review and focus group interview, (2) experts' content validity analysis of 32 items, (3) a preliminary survey on 30 staff members and (4) validity and reliability tests of the instrument on 346 staff members in nursing homes between July and October 2018. RESULTS: The final instrument consists of 17‐items in four categories (family's trust and support, collaborative relationship and communication, encouragement to participate in care and professional care). Each item was rated on a 4‐point Likert scale, and the higher scores indicating better partnership between staff and families of nursing home residents. The reliability of the instrument was 0.90, and the test–retest intra‐class correlation coefficient was 0.96. CONCLUSION: The Scale for Staff–Family Partnership in Long‐term Care (SSFPLC) showed acceptable reliability and validity as an instrument to assess the partnership between nursing home staff and families. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: This tool can be used for evaluating staff and family partnerships within nursing homes.