The development andvalidation of the Breastfeeding Support Skills Tool (BeSST)

Abstract

Objective to develop and validate a reliable tool which will effectively assess clinical skills in relation to breast feeding. Design the development of the tool followed progressive stages, generating a pool of questionnaire items and then subjecting them to a series of rigorous tests of reliability and validity, in order to produce a tested tool. Setting the North of England. Participants the following groups were recruited for the validation process: 32 breast-feeding experts; 31 working midwives with no specific expertise in breast feeding; and 22 first-year pre-registration student midwives with little or no professional experience in this area. Measures the tool consisted of video footage and a pen and paper questionnaire withboth open and closed questions which were then scored numerically. Results the final validated tool consisted of video footage and 30 items (20 open and 10 closed). All open items showed high inter-rater reliability (κ≥0.6). All items produced a good spread of scores and were able to distinguish significantly between level of expertise ( P Conclusions the Breastfeeding Support Skills Tool developed has demonstrated reliability and validity.