Cross-cultural adaptation for Chile of the nursing activities score to measure nursing workload in intensive care units

Abstract

Objective: To describe the adaptation of the Nursing Activities Score (NAS) into Chilean Spanish for use in Chilean intensive care units. Material and methods: Cross-cultural adaptation with semantic and idiomatic equivalence. The methodological steps consisted of translation and back translation, evaluation of content validity and linguistic adaptation to the target population. After the translation, the first version was assessed for content by five expert judges using the content validity coefficient. For the linguistic adaptation, qualitative methodology was applied conducting a focus group with eight clinical nurses, who evaluated the comprehension, viability, clarity and terminology of each NAS item until agreeing upon criteria for a second version of the instrument. Results: Content validity and Lin’s index values were between 0.6 and 1.0 and between 80 and 100, respectively. In the focus group conducted with the clinical nurses some expressions were adjusted to the Chilean culture. There were no changes in the content of the instrument and the second version was considered as the final one. Conclusion: The cross-cultural adaptation of the NAS items were deemed valid and reliable for measuring the workload of nursing in Chilean intensive care units.