Iran Journal of Nursing

Dear Editor
Nursing is an independent discipline and a branch of medical sciences. Its mission is to provide the necessary health, treatment and rehabilitation services at the highest level to ensure, maintain or improve the health of society [1]. Davis et al. (2005) emphasized the importance of measuring patient care quality [2]. In their study, a standard questionnaire named quality patient care scale (QUALPAC) was used to measure the quality of patient care. This tool has been used since 1975 in different countries [3]. Different studies have used this questionnaire with 68 items [4, 5]. The Persian version of this tool was validated in Iran by Khoshkho et al. Based on their results, the Persian version has 72 items rated on a five-option Likert scale [6]. Different versions of QUALPAC been used in various studies conducted in Iran [4, 8, 9, 10], and its reason is not clear. For example, in the study by Heydari and et al. [11], the 65-item version of QUALPAC was used, with no reference was provided for the applied version. 
Considering that various studies in Iran, despite citing Khoshkho et al. [6], have changed the number and scoring of questionnaire [4, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14], ambiguity has been created in identifying the appropriate tool for measuring the quality of patient care in Iran. By correcting this problem, (a) the ambiguity can be resolved, (b) the validity of studies can be improved, and (c) the trust in the studies’ results and, subsequently, citation to them can be increased. 

References

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