A nurses’ alarm fatigue questionnaire: development and psychometric properties

Abstract

Alarm fatigue can adversely affect nurses' efficiency and concentration on their tasks, which is a threat to patients' safety. The purpose of the present study was to develop and test the psychometric accuracy of an alarm fatigue questionnaire for nurses. This study was conducted in two stages: in stage one, in order to establish the different aspects of the concept of alarm fatigue, the researchers reviewed the available literature-articles and books-on alarm fatigue, and then consulted several experts in a meeting to define alarm fatigue and develop statements for the questionnaire. In stage two, after the final draft had been approved, the validity of the instrument was measured using the two methods of face validity (the quantitative and qualitative approaches) and content validity (the qualitative and quantitative approaches). Test-retest, Cronbach's alpha, and Principal Component Analysis were used for item reduction and reliability analysis. Based on the results of stage one, the researchers extracted 30 statements based on a 5-point Likert scale. In stage two, after the face and content validity of the questionnaire had been established, 19 statements were left in the instrument. Based on factor loadings of the items and "alpha if item deleted" and after the second round of consultation with the expert panel, six items were removed from the scale. The test of the reliability of nurses' alarm fatigue questionnaire based on the internal homogeneity and retest methods yielded the following results: test-retest correlation coefficient = 0.99; Guttman split-half correlation coefficient = 0.79; Cronbach's alpha = 0.91. Regarding the importance of recognizing alarm fatigue in nurses, there is need for an instrument to measure the phenomenon. The results of the study show that the developed questionnaire is valid and reliable enough for measuring alarm fatigue in nurses.

Critical care nurses’ knowledge of alarm fatigue and practices towards alarms: A multicentre study

“…Recent developments on a new tool to measure alarm fatigue have revealed promising results. Torabizadeh et al, (2016) report good internal homogeneity and retest methods for their alarm fatigue questionnaire.…”

Assessing Face Validity of the Hexcom Model for Capturing Complexity in the Clinical Practice: A Delphi Study

“…To assess the degree of consensus after each round, the scores were analysed using the Content Validity by Item Index (CVI-I), and the number of experts that showed some disagreement. CVI-I allows assessing quantitatively the degree of agreement amongst experts on a given item, dividing the number of experts agreeing (scoring 4 or 5) with a given item by the total number of experts responding to that question [57]. Following the American Educational Research Association recommendations for studies with a panel of 6 or more experts, a CVI-I of over 0.78 was interpreted as significant consensus [42,43].…”

“…[39][40][41][42][43][44][45], Patient (q. [46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59], the clarity of the translation into Spanish and its correspondence with the original Catalan version (60) and one last open question to collect generic qualitative feedback on the model or any of the instruments. Participants were asked to provide their degree of agreement with each statement using a Likert scale [39,40] including the following grades: 1 = "Strongly disagree", 2 = "Disagree", 3 = "Indifferent", 4 = "Agree", and 5 = "Strongly agree".…”

A call to alarms: Current state and future directions in the battle against alarm fatigue

“…Presently, strategies to decrease alarm fatigue are evaluated by comparing numbers of alarms before and after the intervention. Some alarm fatigue surveys are available, and based primarily on nurse perceptions [3, 23, 35, 36]. More accurate and unbiased alarm fatigue metrics must be developed.…”