Validation of ‘the staff attitudes to nutritional nursing care geriatric scale (SANN-G scale)’ in Italian Loris Bonetti 1 RN, MSCNURS, Annamaria Bagnasco 2 RN, MSCNURS, PhD, Giuseppe Aleo 3 MA & Loredana Sasso 4 RN, MSCNURS 1 PhD Student, 2 Researcher, 3 Lecturer in Scientific English, 4 Associate Professor of Nursing, Department of Health Sciences, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy BONETTI L., BAGNASCO A., ALEO G. & SASSO L. (2013) Validation of ‘the staff attitudes to nutritional nursing care geriatric scale (SANN-G scale)’ in Italian. International Nursing Review Aim: To validate in Italian ‘The Staff Attitudes to Nutritional Nursing Care Geriatric scale’ (SANN-G scale), a tool created in Sweden to measure nurses’ attitudes towards nutritional care in older people. Background: Malnutrition in institutionalized older people is a serious problem having negative impact on patient outcomes. It is reported in the literature that nurses have negative attitudes towards nutritional care. Methods: Forward and back-translation were carried out to build the Italian version of the tool. Content and face validity were then examined by pilot study. Test-retest reliability with Spearman’s rho (rs) correlation, intraclass correlation (ICC) and internal consistency reliability with Cronbach’s a were assessed. Differences between test-rest were assessed by t-test. Results: Linguistic and semantic adaptation of the tool into Italian was successful. Thirty-three nurses skilled in caring for older patients did pilot testing and 46 test-retesting. SANN-G GITA-scale achieved good content and face validity, good internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s a= 0.85) and acceptable stability [rs = 0.75, P = 0.001; ICC = 0.76, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.63–0.86; P = 0.001]. The t-test showed no significant difference between test and retest results, confirming stability of the tool (t(64) =-0.98; P = 0.33). Discussion: The process of adaptation of the scale from Swedish to Italian language was successful. Thus, the SANN-GITA scale can be useful to assess attitudes of nursing staff to nutritional care in the Italian context. Conclusions: This tool will allow the identification of areas where Italian nurses have negative attitudes and where to implement strategies to improve overall nutritional care. Keywords: Attitudes, Malnutrition, Nursing, Nursing Staff, Nutritional Care, Older People, Reliability, Validity Introduction Malnutrition in institutionalized older people is a serious issue because it increases mortality rate, length of hospital stay, infec- tion susceptibility, risk of developing pressure wounds and time required for them to heal. All these aspects produce consider- able harm to patients and increase health care costs (Chapman Correspondence address: Dr Annamaria Bagnasco, Department of Health Sciences, University of Genoa,Via Pastore 1, 16132 Genoa, Italy; Tel: 3472721175; Fax: 010 353 8552; E-mail: annamaria.bagnasco@unige.it. Conflict of interest statement: the authors declare that they have no con- flict of interest. Funding: the study was funded by the Italian National Board of Nursing (Federazione Nazionale dei Collegi IPASVI) Research Methods © 2013 International Council of Nurses 1