The needs of persons with major mental illness extend beyond clinical treatment. Needs of persons are individualized and differ from one another. Persons with major mental illnesses often struggle with persistent symptoms that interfere with daily functioning. In order to have an understanding about the differing needs and care required by such persons with major mental illness, assessment is very much important. Few tools are available to assess the needs of patients in general but to the best of the knowledge of the researcher, there is dearth of comprehensive tool to capture context-specific nursing care needs of persons with major mental illness. Therefore, a tool is needed to be developed, which can assess different domains of nursing care needs in persons with major mental illness in clinical settings so that adequate care programs can be planned. The present study thus aims to develop a tool which is the ‘Nursing Care Need Assessment Tool (NC-NAT)’ to assess various needs of persons with major mental illness and to test the developed tool among persons with major mental illness. The aim of the study is to develop and validate a reliable tool to assess the nursing care needs of persons with major mental illness.

The study will be conducted at the in-patient and out-patient department of a tertiary mental health care institute of north-east India in two phases and five steps. It will employ a mixed method research design with the Institute Ethics Clearance. Phase I will include two steps i.e., i) Item generation and ii) Content adequacy assessment, where In-depth interview using case study method will be carried out by the researcher to explore the needs of persons with major mental illness to generate item pool, following which cognitive interviewing as well as content validation will be done. At least 5 units of case studies will be done (1 unit will comprise of data from the patient, caregiver, nurse and the patient’s file) for each diagnosis of Psychosis, OCD, BPAD and Dementia until no new themes are generated. Phase II will include three steps i.e., i) Questionnaire administration, ii) Item Evaluation and iii) Optimization of scale length.  Cross sectional descriptive research design will be used to establish reliability, evaluate items and optimise the scale length with the help of computing the correlation, variances, dimensionality and reliability. Purposive sampling will be done for establishing the psychometric property of the tool with 300 participants.

The analysis of Phase I will be done with the help of thematic analysis while analysis of Phase II will be done with the help of SPSS updated version. The statistical plan for analysis of the data will be on the basis of objectives in terms of descriptive and inferential statistics.