Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Italian Validation of a Questionnaire on Nurses' Personal and Professional Use, Knowledge, and Attitudes

BACKGROUND: Patients are showing an increasing interest in the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Most nurses are open to the adoption of CAM into clinical nursing practice, but they may experience a lack of knowledge about the safe and effective use of these therapies. Several studies concerning nurses' knowledge and attitudes toward CAM have been published, but only in one, the authors (Shorofi and Arbon) used a validated questionnaire. In Italy, there are no validated questionnaires to investigate this aspect of nursing practice. PURPOSE: To test the psychometric properties of the Italian Shorofi and Arbon questionnaire for use with Italian nurses. METHODS: A forward-backward translation method was used to translate the questionnaire from English to Italian. Content validity, face validity and reliability were established. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: This study examined the potential usefulness of the Shorofi and Arbon questionnaire for the evaluation of CAM knowledge of Italian speaking nurses, which showed good content validity and good reliability.