Measuring Sensitive Nursing Outcomes in Patient with Acute Myocardial Infarction: Tool Development and Validation

Abstract

Context: The outcomes movement is a young science; improving care by determining the outcomes of nursing interventions will give scientific validity to strategies used by nursing in various venues. Cardiovascular nurses contribute significantly to health outcomes and frequently assume responsibility for the clinical and organizational processes to ensure positive outcomes for patients and families.

Aims: This study aimed to identify nursing-sensitive outcomes in patients with acute myocardial infarction, to develop a tool to measure nursing-sensitive outcomes of caring patients with myocardial infarction, and to evaluate the content, face validity, reliability, and nursing sensitivity of 46 nursing-sensitive outcomes concerning bio-psycho-socio-educational aspects of care for patients with myocardial infarction from the Nursing Outcomes Classification (NOC).

Methods: A survey research design was used in this study to assess the content and face validity of the designed instrument, and inter-rater reliability was utilized to assure its reliability. Thirty patients with acute myocardial infarction were subjected to measuring their nursing-sensitive outcomes during their stay in the CCUs or intermediate units. Fifty-nine experts were invited to participate in this study. Nursing-Sensitive Outcomes Measuring Scale was developed and subjected to testing reliability, validity, and sensitivity.

Results: Most of the studied outcomes showed a high degree of consistency, as indicated by ICC above 0.900. 100% of the experts rated 14 out of 46 outcomes as very important; the remaining outcomes were assessed by more than 75% of the experts as important. Also, 18 out of 46 outcomes were rated by the 100% experts as very sensitive to the contribution of nursing intervention; no one outcome was rated as not important or not sensitive to nursing contribution.

Conclusions: The study provided evidence of outcomes content validity, reliability, and nursing sensitivity of the studied outcomes. The study recommended the testing of NOC outcomes in various clinical settings with appropriate training for nurses and the inclusion of NOC into nursing curricula to be utilized in clinical education as a continuum for nursing diagnoses classification.