Validation of the Staff Attitudes to Nutritional Nursing Care Geriatric scale in Italian

Aim: To validate the Staff Attitudes to Nutritional Nursing Care Geriatric scale in Italian, a tool created in Sweden to measure nurses' attitudes towards nutritional care in older people. Background: Malnutrition in institutionalized older people is a serious problem having negative impact on patient outcomes. It is reported in the literature that nurses have negative attitudes towards nutritional care. Methods: Forward and back-translation were carried out to build the Italian version of the tool. Content and face validity were then examined by pilot study. Test-retest reliability with Spearman's rho (rs) correlation, intraclass correlation (ICC) and internal consistency reliability with Cronbach's a were assessed. Differences between test-rest were assessed by t-test. Results: Linguistic and semantic adaptation of the tool into Italian was successful. Thirty-three nurses skilled in caring for older patients did pilot testing and 46 test-retesting. SANN-G GITA-scale achieved good content and face validity, good internal consistency reliability (Cronbach's alpha = 0.85) and acceptable stability [rs = 0.75, P = 0.001; ICC = 0.76, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.63-0.86; P = 0.001]. The t-test showed no significant difference between test and retest results, confirming stability of the tool (t(64) = -0.98; P = 0.33). Discussion: The process of adaptation of the scale from Swedish to Italian language was successful. Thus, the SANN-GITA scale can be useful to assess attitudes of nursing staff to nutritional care in the Italian context. Conclusions: This tool will allow the identification of areas where Italian nurses have negative attitudes and where to implement strategies to improve overall nutritional care.