Development of an Evaluation Scale of Risk Manager’s Role for the Head Nurse

Abstract

The aims of this study were to develop the evaluation scale of a risk manager's role for head nurses and to examine its reliability and validity. Using questionnaires, which required 1,167 head nurses in national university hospitals and general hospitals with more than 400 beds to freely describe the role of a risk manager as a head nurse, data were collected from 859 respondents. Sixty-eight items in relation to the role of a risk manager were obtained from the respondents' free descriptions, the literature review and the examination of its validity by general risk managers and researchers of nursing management.

Twenty items of those were dropped by using the Stepwise item selection analysis because of the decrease of their GFI value. The exploratory factor analysis, then, revealed that the scale had following six factors : ‘giving specific advice on the prevention of accidents in clinical nursing', ‘making the most of incident and accident reports', ‘cooperating with the relevant departments and the MRM committee', ‘providing education and support for staff on risk management', ‘coping with the occurrence of accidents', and ‘the proper use of an accident prevention manual'. In addition, the Stepwise exploratory factor analysis made each factor with best fitting, and the Cronbach's alpha coefficients were above 0.95 in all factors. Therefore, it was considered that its reliability was demonstrated to create the six factors.

In conclusion, this scale will be useful to evaluate a risk manager's role for head nurses, and result in the effective performance of their own duty as risk managers.