Psychometric Evaluation of the Korean Version of Patient-Centered Care Scale for Hospital Nurses

Abstract

Patient-centered care (PCC) encourages active collaboration and effective communication among patients, their family caregivers, and health-care providers to achieve high-quality care. Despite its importance, there is no validated and reliable Korean instrument for assessing PCC among health-care providers yet. This study aimed to establish a Korean version of the PCC (K-PCC) Scale using international translation guidelines and systematically evaluating its psychometric properties. The participants in this study were 424 nurses with a mean age of 28.07 years (+/-4.56) from two university hospitals in South Korea. Confirmatory factor analysis identified that the revised model, which included three factors (holistic, collaborative, and responsive care), had a satisfactory goodness of fit. The testing of item convergent and item-discriminant validity revealed a 100% scaling success. Criterion validity showed that nurses who had positive perceptions of K-PCC were more likely to practice PCC (r = .692, p < .001). The internal consistency for 23 items as a whole was good, at .935. From these results, K-PCC is considered a valid and reliable instrument for measuring health-care providers' perceptions of PCC among Korean populations. Scale brevity and simplicity, together with rigorous testing, indicate that validation of the PCC Scale may be helpful for ensuring quality improvement in hospital settings.