Abstract:
Background: The concept of neonatal near miss is used to identify neonates who nearly died
but survived a life-threatening complication in the first 28 days of life. Neonatal mortality is
the tip of the iceberg. Quality improvement through utilization of a validated scale and
reduction in adverse neonatal outcome is a priority for achieving sustainable development
goals.
Objectives: To develop and assess the content validity of neonatal near-miss scale in the
public health hospitals in Amhara Regional State, northwest Ethiopia.
Methods: A literature review was performed prior to the development of the neonatal nearmiss assessment scale. An expert panel committee was formed by health facility practitioners
and by the members of the academia. Two rounds of meetings were conducted with the
expert panel to reach consensus on the face and content validity. The content validity index,
Kappa statistics, and the content validity ratio were computed to estimate the content
validity scale of neonatal near miss.
Results: In this study, four domains (pragmatic, clinical, management, and lab-investigations)
with 32 items were identified. The item-level content validity index ranged from 0.7 to 1. The
overall scale content validity (S-CVI) (average) for the domains (pragmatic, clinical, management, and lab-investigations) were 0.98, 0.95, 0.96, and 0.96, respectively. The overall S-CVI
(universal) was 0.78 to 1, whereas the overall S-CVI (average) of neonatal near miss assessment scale was found to be 0.96. The content validity ratio and Kappa statistics values ranged
from 0.6 to 1 and 0.9 to 1 for the respective domains.
Conclusion: The identified four domains and the respective items were valid enough (content-wise) to be used as identification criteria for neonatal near-miss cases. The scale will
contribute to neonatal near-miss identification and also improve the quality of neonatal
management car
