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Background: Oral health multidisciplinary team (OHMDT) care places nurses in a coordinating role across specialties, but the absence of a context-specific assessment tool limits training evaluation, competency benchmarking, and quality improvement. This study aimed to develop and preliminarily validate an OHMDT nurse competency scale. Methods: We conducted a mixed-methods instrument-development study with two phases. First, an item pool derived from a systematic literature review was refined through two Delphi rounds with a multidisciplinary expert panel (n = 16). Second, a cross-sectional survey was administered to OHMDT nurses from three hospitals of different levels in Guizhou, China (September-December 2025). The final analytic sample included 120 nurses, and 25 completed a 2-week retest. Psychometric evaluation included content validity, item analysis, exploratory factor analysis using principal axis factoring with promax rotation, internal consistency, test-retest reliability, floor and ceiling effects, and known-groups validity. Results: The final scale contained 23 items. Content validity was high (S-CVI/Ave = 0.93). Exploratory factor analysis supported a four-factor structure (KMO = 0.87; Bartlett’s χ 2 253 = 824.63, p < 0.001) explaining 47.3% of total variance. The total scale showed high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.895) and good 2-week stability (ICC3,1 = 0.884; 95% CI: 0.756– 0.947). No floor or ceiling effects were observed. Total scores were higher among nurses with longer OHMDT experience (t69 = − 9.59, p < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 2.32) and differed significantly across professional titles (F3,116 = 41.01, p < 0.001, η 2 = 0.515). Conclusion: The OHMDT Nurse Competency Scale showed promising reliability and preliminary validity in this single-province sample. At the current stage, it is best used for research, baseline assessment, or preliminary clinical screening rather than high-stakes standalone decisions. Larger multicenter studies with confirmatory factor analysis and criterion validation are needed. Keywords: oral health multidisciplinary team, nurse competency, scale development, psychometric validation, reliability, validity, factor analysis
Jiang et al. (Fri,) studied this question.