Nurse-Physician Collaboration Scale: A contribution to the Italian validation

This study aimed at providing an Italian validation of the Nurse-Physician Collaboration Scale (NPCS), an instrument recently developed in Japan and then in USA to measure the perception of collaborative practice between nurses and physicians. The Italian version, translated and adapted from the original version, was composed by 20 items on a 5-point Likert scale and was administered to 498 professionals (360 nurses and 138 physicians) working in several hospitals of the North Italy. Confirmatory factor analysis and Rasch analysis showed a mono-dimensional factor structure and proved that the scale was able to measure adequately the underlined construct for both professionals. Differential analysis showed that physicians perceived collaborative practice more than nurses did, and that collaborative practice was perceived to a lesser extent in contexts in which there was higher proceduralization and technologization of the work such as critical care units.