A valid and reliable tool in assessing patient education: the Patient Education Implementation Scale.

Aim: This study aimed to develop a valid and reliable tool for assessing the frequency of nurses' implementation of patient education in line with the stages of determining needs, assessment and planning, implementation, and evaluation and documentation.

Background: Patient education is important in terms of the patient's completion of a reliable and effective treatment process. Patient education is one of the main responsibilities of a nurse. No valid and reliable study that assessed nurses' patient education process implementation was found in the literature.

Methods: This instrument development study was conducted with 583 nurses working at university, private, and research and training hospitals located in the province of Istanbul in Turkey. The items of the Patient Education Implementation Scale were developed in line with the literature and expert opinions. The analyses involved descriptive statistics and psychometric analyses. The level of statistical significance was accepted as P < .05.

Results: The content validity index was calculated as 0.96 for the 42-item Patient Education Implementation Scale, which explained 63.37% of the total variance. The scale items whose factor loads were 0.45 or higher were divided into four factors as (a) determining education needs, (b) assessment and planning, (c) implementation, and (d) evaluation and documentation. The Cronbach's alpha coefficients were 0.78-0.95 for the subdimensions and 0.97 for the general scale.

Conclusion: It was determined that the Patient Education Implementation Scale is a valid and reliable tool.