Validation of the Chinese version of the telehealth attitudes scale for nurses: a cross-sectional study.

BACKGROUND

Telehealth helps overcome temporal and spatial constraints, enabling remote disease monitoring and rehabilitation guidance for patients. Nurse-led telehealth services optimize resource allocation by significantly reducing non-essential hospital visits and readmissions, while providing personalized care and rehabilitation, thereby lowering the economic burden on patients. However, effective tools for assessing nurses' attitudes towards telehealth adoption remain lacking.

AIM: This study primarily aimed to translate and culturally adapt the Nurses' Attitudes Towards Telehealth Scale (NATUTS) for the Chinese context and to subsequently validate its psychometric properties.

METHODS

After securing authorization from the original authors, the NATUTS was systematically adapted through translation, back-translation, cultural refinement, and pilot testing. The culturally adapted Chinese version was then psychometrically validated with 452 nurses from tertiary hospitals in Hubei Province, selected via convenience sampling.

RESULTS

The Chinese NATUTS comprises 19 items across three dimensions: Satisfaction, Rejection, and Development. The scale demonstrated satisfactory reliability (Cronbach's α = 0.893; McDonald's ω = 0.928; test-retest = 0.879) and validity (I-CVI: 0.778-1.00; S-CVI/Ave = 0.971). Confirmatory factor analysis yielded a good model fit (χ²/df = 1.335, RMSEA = 0.058,SRMR = 0.045, CFI = 0.983, TLI = 0.981).

CONCLUSION

The Chinese Nurses' Telehealth Attitudes Scale exhibits strong reliability and validity, demonstrating its effectiveness as an instrument for measuring nurses' attitudes towards telehealth technology adoption in China.