Assessment of Scrub Practitioners’ List of Intraoperative Non‐Technical Skills (SPLINTS) in an Asian Ambulatory Surgical Setting

Communication and other nontechnical skills can affect the number of adverse events occurring in perioperative areas. Our study assessed the properties of the Scrub Practitioners’ List of Intraoperative Non-Technical Skills (SPLINTS) used to assess nontechnical skills of scrub nurses in a diverse Asian ophthalmic ambulatory setting. We evaluated the content validation index, cultural equivalence index, concurrent validity, interrater reliability, test-retest reliability, internal consistency, and concurrent validity. The content validity and cultural equivalence indices were 0.93 and 0.91, respectively. We found that the tool showed acceptable interrater reliability, acceptable test-retest reliability, and an appropriate Cronbach alpha ranging from 0.80 to 0.88. We found satisfactory concurrent validity between the SPLINTS and the communication and teamwork scale assessment (rs = 0.73, P < .001) and clinical teamwork scale (rs = 0.64, P < .001). We concluded that SPLINTS is a sound psychometric tool for assessing the nontechnical skills of culturally-diverse scrub persons in ambulatory surgery settings.

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