The survey was originally adapted from the scales used by Klim, Kelly, Kerr, Wood and McCann (Klim et al., 2013 (link)) and Street, Eustace, Livingston, Craike, Kent, and Patterson (Street et al., 2011 (link)) to identify nurses’ perceptions of their current practices and of the components essential for effective shift-to-shift nursing handovers. It has been validated in a Hong Kong-based study that evaluated nurses’ perceptions of and communication practices during handovers (Pun et al., 2019 (link), 2020 (link)), where it was shown to have a high degree of reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.99) and an intra-class correlation coefficient of 0.92.
The final version of the questionnaire includes 23 items centred on nurses’ perceptions of the presentation, organisation, comprehension, and dissemination of patient information and their knowledge of the ISBAR protocol. To reduce possible response bias and simplify the analysis, all of the survey items were rated on a 4-point Likert scale from 1 to 4, with 1 indicating ‘strongly disagree’, 2 – ‘disagree’, 3 – ‘agree’, and 4 – ‘strongly agree’.
Five out of the 23 items were rated on four variable measures in this study, namely the knowledge of the ISBAR protocol, perceived quality of handover, up-to-date information about the patient, and understanding of the patient care plan. Specifically, the perceived quality of handover was measured by an item on whether the handover information was presented in a systematic and organised manner; up-to-date information referred to the item asking about the amount of updated information about patients that was received by nurses after the training; understanding of the patient care-plan is assessed by the item on participants’ knowledge of diagnosis, treatment, and discharge about the patients after training. To measure nurses’ knowledge/perception of the ISBAR protocol, two items, namely (a) ‘I believe that using ISBAR will help me improve my communication skills with co-workers’ and (b) ‘I believe that using ISBAR will increase patient safety and care quality’ were computed into a mean score, and the internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.92) was deemed acceptable.
The final version of the questionnaire includes 23 items centred on nurses’ perceptions of the presentation, organisation, comprehension, and dissemination of patient information and their knowledge of the ISBAR protocol. To reduce possible response bias and simplify the analysis, all of the survey items were rated on a 4-point Likert scale from 1 to 4, with 1 indicating ‘strongly disagree’, 2 – ‘disagree’, 3 – ‘agree’, and 4 – ‘strongly agree’.
Five out of the 23 items were rated on four variable measures in this study, namely the knowledge of the ISBAR protocol, perceived quality of handover, up-to-date information about the patient, and understanding of the patient care plan. Specifically, the perceived quality of handover was measured by an item on whether the handover information was presented in a systematic and organised manner; up-to-date information referred to the item asking about the amount of updated information about patients that was received by nurses after the training; understanding of the patient care-plan is assessed by the item on participants’ knowledge of diagnosis, treatment, and discharge about the patients after training. To measure nurses’ knowledge/perception of the ISBAR protocol, two items, namely (a) ‘I believe that using ISBAR will help me improve my communication skills with co-workers’ and (b) ‘I believe that using ISBAR will increase patient safety and care quality’ were computed into a mean score, and the internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.92) was deemed acceptable.
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