The Development of an Instrument to Measure Nurses' Attitudes Toward Cost Control in Health Care

The purpose of this study was to develop an instrument which would measure nurses' attitudes toward cost control in health care, and measure their knowledge of hospital-related costs. A list of 75 statements pertaining to the control of hospital costs was compiled from a literature review and from personal experience of this investigator. A panel of registered nurses with financial backgrounds decided upon the 30 items which would comprise the first section of the questionnaire by Q-sorting the statements on two different occasions. Each of the 30 items was placed upon a four-point Likert scale, with 12 being negatively stated and 18 positively stated. The second section of the instrument consisted of 10 completion items which asked for the exact cost of specific hospital procedures and supplies. This section was designed to measure nurses' cost-awareness levels. The reliability of the questionnaire was then tested in a comparative survey involving staff nurses in three different hospitals, two nonprofit and one for-profit institution. Fifty-nine RN's and 34 LPN's participated in the research by completing the questionnaire twice in a 3 week period to test-retest reliability of the questionnaire. The correlation coefficient calculated from both administrations was .79, indicating a high degree of reliability. Results of this study demonstrated that staff nurses do have a favorable attitude toward cost control in health care, with RN's feeling more strongly about its importance than LPN's. No significant difference was shown to exist between for-profit and nonprofit hospital nurses' attitudes toward cost control. Responses to the cost awareness section made it clear that the staff nurses possessed little knowledge concerning actual costs of procedures and supplies. Every group responded to at least 50% of all items with question marks, or unknown answers. The mean differences between the items' actual costs and the nurses' responses were $8.81 per item for RN's and $15.88 per item for LPN's.

Author dc:creator

• Hickman, Constance D.

Statement dc:rights

• This item is protected by copyright and unless otherwise specified the copyright of this thesis/dissertation is held by the author.

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1808/37782

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:kuscholarworks.ku.edu:1808/37782