Psychometric properties of the ethical safety questionnaire in acute healthcare environments - a cross-sectional study

Ethical safety supports the development of ethical competencies and sound decision-making, central to good healthcare practice. The Ethical Safety Questionnaire (ESQ) evaluates ethical safety in healthcare environments, based on three subscales; Ethical Autonomy, Ethical Respect, and Ethical Trust. The objective of this study was to determine the psychometric properties of the ESQ in acute healthcare environments. The domain development of the ESQ was carried out in Finland in 2019. The ESQ was translated into English, Latvian and Swedish. To determine the validity of the ESQ, a cross-sectional design was used. Data was collected from nurses and physiotherapists (n = 275) in Sweden, Finland, Latvia and Malta, using purposive sampling. The validation (in all languages) consisted of an exploratory factor analysis, Rasch analysis and network analysis. This assessed the ESQ for internal consistency and construct validity. Ethical approval was granted from all participating countries in accordance with national law and the Declaration of Helsinki. The internal consistency for the three subscales of the ESQ, Ethical Autonomy, Ethical Respect, and Ethical Trust, was satisfactory, with Cronbach’s α coefficients (> 0.7) and McDonald’s omega coefficients (> 0.7). All corrected item-total correlations among the items of the ESQ were high, exceeding 0.6. Thus, the ESQ exhibits acceptable levels of internal consistency and construct validity. The results suggest that the ESQ is a reliable tool for evaluating ethical safety in healthcare environments. However, the two general items in the ESQ can be omitted without loss of scale validity.