Development and Validation of a Patient-Reported Scale Measuring the Communication Skills of Nurses Based on the “NURSE” Program

Abstract

When patients express emotional concerns, empathic responses from medical staff reduce their psychological distress. The NURSE program was developed in Japan to facilitate the emotional expression of patients. The NURSE program consists of five communication skills: (1) naming, (2) understanding, (3) respecting, (4) supporting, and (5) exploring. However, this program has no evaluation tool. Therefore, we developed a five-item scale based on the “NURSE” communication skills program and confirmed its validity. We conducted a cross-sectional self-administered questionnaire survey using the test-retest method in December 2022. The potential participants were aged ≥ 20 who had been hospitalized for one week or more within the past year and registered with an Internet research company. For concurrent validity, we collected data using the Japanese version of the Feeling Heard and Understood Scale (FHU) and Clinician & Group Survey Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CG-CHAPS). A total of 608 patients participated in the study. There were 306 (50.3%) male participants, with a mean age of 57.0 ± 16.8 years. The mean ± SD of the total score was 12.2 ± 4.3, and Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was 0.95. The overall intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.54. Spearman’s correlation coefficients for this scale and the FHU and for this scale and CG-CHAPS were 0.66 and 0.68, respectively (p < 0.0001). This study developed a scale to evaluate the communication skills of nurses, based on the NURSE program, to facilitate emotional expression and demonstrated sufficient validity and moderate reliability.