A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF MEASUREMENT TOOLS FOR ASSESSING NURSING CARE BEHAVIORS

Care is the core of nursing and one of the most important and basic components to achieve human survival and development. Meanwhile, measuring caring behaviors is of great importance from nurses' and patients' perspectives, since patient-centered nursing care is the main factor in patient satisfaction during the hospital stay. This study aimed to evaluate common tools used to measure caring behaviors.

In this systematic review, 1090 articles published in English and Persian in 1981-2020 from the databases of PubMed (MEDE), CINAHL, Scopus, Science direct, Web of Science, and other related databases (Google Scholar, Magiran, Scientific Information Database, Irandoc). The above literature search was conducted using the keywords of "Caring behavior," "Tool," "Scale, ""Measure," "Inventory," and "Questionnaire," as well as the operators "AND" and "OR." All searched articles were entered into the ENDNOTE software version X5 (Thomson Reuters, USA) to remove duplicate articles. Articles that met the inclusion criteria were reviewed.

Based on the keywords, 1090 articles were included in this study. Then, the abstracts were reviewed, and in several stages, duplicate and unrelated articles were removed from the study. Finally, 53 articles were selected for comprehensive review and data extraction. In these articles, 11 different tools were used to measure caring behaviors.

Proper caring behaviors can improve patients' satisfaction with nursing services. Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate nurses' caring behaviors with standard and valid tools, while new and standard tools for measuring these behaviors have not been psychometrically tested in Iran, and this seems necessary.