Development of the Critical Cae Air Transport Nurse Deployability Index (CCATT-DI)

Introduction: Highly trained Critical Care Air Transport Teams (CCATT) extend the capabilities of aeromedical transportation in the care of critically ill or injured patients from the battlefield.

Purpose and Design: The purpose of this instrument development research is to develop a deployment preparedness self-evaluation checklist for CCATT nurses.

Sample: Previous TSNRP-funded research provided transcripts of 12 focus groups and interviews with 23 CCATT nurses about their patient care experiences in the combat environment.

Methods and Analysis: In this study, we analyzed the transcripts to identify specific patient care behaviors during deployments. We categorized these behaviors into the six dimensions from Reineck's research on Army nurse readiness plus three additional dimensions specific to CCATT nurses. Eleven CCATT nurses served on the expert panel in Delphi round 1 to review 84 potential items for level of importance to the concept of "deployment preparedness" on a scale of 0 to 9. Items with a median score of 7, 8, or 9 were retained. In Delphi round 2, the remaining 77 items were evaluated for level of importance on a scale of 1 to 3. Only the 39 items with a median of 2.5 or more were retained; two items were divided in two for a total of 41 items.

Findings: This procedure assured the content validity of a 41-item prototype of the CCATT Nurse Deployment Index (CCATTN-DI). The next step will be to test the psychometric properties of this instrument with CCATT nurses with varied levels of deployment experience.

Nursing Implications: The long-term goal is to use this instrument as a pre-deployment screening tool to identify specific training needs of CCATT teams, a self-assessment tool for individual CCATT nurses, for post-deployment evaluation of preparedness as it relates to mission success, and as a pre-posttest evaluation of deployment training.

Final report is available on NTRL: https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/dashboard/searchResults/titleDetail/PB2008112238.xhtml#