Objective In order to evaluate the public health emergency response capabilities of emergency nurses, a questionnaire was prepared and its reliability and validity were tested.

Methods Based on the literature review, combined with the interview results of 8 nurses in the emergency department, the preliminary questionnaire was determined by Delphi method, then this questionnaire was used to survey the capabilities of 228 emergency nurses, furthermore to verify its reliability and validity, and finally a complete questionnaire was formed.

Results The questionnaire included 7 items, including emergency knowledge, rescue ability, critical thinking ability, communication ability, organization and coordination ability, professional ethics and professional development, and 37 items. The effective recovery rate of the two rounds of consulting experts was 100% and 95%, respectively. The experts' authoritative coefficient was 0.85 and 0.86, and the coordination coefficient was 0.337 and 0.340, respectively. The item level content validity index (I-CVI) ranged from 0.789 to 1.000, and the scale level (S-CVI) was 0.960. Exploratory factor analysis extracted a total of 7 common factors, namely emergency knowledge, critical thinking ability, rescue ability, professional ethics, communication ability, professional development and organization and coordination ability. Their cumulative contribution rate was 81.625%. The load on each item of all 7 common factors was higher than 0.4. The total Cronbach's α coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.879 and that of each dimension varied from 0.828 to 0.857. The half-fold reliability was 0.818 and that of each dimension varied from 0.803 to 0.831.

Conclusion The prepared questionnaire had good reliability and validity and can be used as an investigation tool to survey the public health emergency response ability among emergency nurses.