Content validity of a culturally adapted checklist for self-assessment of critical incident reporting system audit teams in a Swiss university hospital

Background: Critical Incident Reporting Systems (CIRS) support the analysis of critical incidents and foster quality improvement in healthcare. The analysis of CIRS reports by designated CIRS teams enable organizational learning. To maintain a constructive work flow CIRS teams should be able to self-assess their work. We adapted the checklist used by the Dutch Healthcare Inspectorate to judge the quality of sentinel event analysis reports provided by hospitals.Method: The 26 items of the Dutch checklist were translated into German and culturally adapted to be used in a Swiss university hospital. Relevance and comprehensibility were rated by experts applying the Content Validity Index on item level (I-CVI) and on the checklist level (S-CVI). Five CIRS team members tested the usefulness of the revised checklist and provided feedback which we used to further revise the checklist.Results: Comprehensibility of the 19 items ranged from 58.3 % to 100 %, and the I-CVI ranged between 0.17 and 1.0. The S-CVI achieved a good 0.80. For reasons of clarity we modified, deleted and added items. CIRS team members regarded this further adapted 15-item checklist to be of limited utility.Discussion: The adapted checklist for self-assessment of the CIRS teams' work flow received good ratings for content validity but its usefulness for CIRS teams was found to be limited. The checklist may benefit from further development.