Development, reliability and validity of a tool, to measure emergency department clinicians’ attitudes towards family presence (FP) during acute deterioration in adult patients

SummaryDespite many studies of family presence during resuscitation, no validated tool exploring the attitudes and beliefs of healthcare staff towards family presence has been published. The aim of this paper is to describe the development of a tool to accurately measure the attitudes and beliefs of emergency department staff towards family presence in the deteriorating adult patient, present the results of validity and reliability testing, and present the final validated tool.Twenty-nine items were developed, informed by themes from the literature and unvalidated published tools related to family presence during resuscitation. The tool was piloted on a sample of 68 emergency nursing and medical staff. Content validity and face validity were established using feedback from participants. Reliability was established by unidimensionality, exploratory factor analysis and internal consistency.Sixteen items were deleted from the original tool due to low item-to-total correlations and low communalities. Exploratory factor analysis of the remaining items revealed four factors with acceptable correlation coefficients and appropriate explanation of variance. Cronbach's alpha for each factor was >0.7 indicating a high degree of internal consistency. The four factors were labelled and arranged in a logical order to form the final tool, the Emergency Department Family Presence Survey.