Objective To construct a sensitive indicator system for nursing quality in the anesthesia intensive care unit (AICU) and validate its reliability and validity, providing a scientific basis for improving clinical nursing quality.

Methods Based on the "three-dimensional quality structure" theory, a specialized quality indicator system was constructed according to the nursing characteristics of the AICU. An indicator library was initially established through literature analysis. Two rounds of expert consultations were conducted using the Delphi expert consultation method. The analytic hierarchy process was employed to determine weights and validate the reliability and validity of the indicator system.

Results The response rate of the first-round consultation questionnaire was 90.00%, and that of the second round was 97.78%. The expert authority coefficients for the two rounds of consultations were 0.826 and 0.885, respectively, indicating a high level of expert authority. The finally constructed indicator system included three primary indicatorselement quality (structure), process quality (process), and outcome quality (result), twelve secondary indicators (four in the structural dimension, four in the process dimension, and four in the outcome dimension), and forty-three tertiaryindicators (forty-three specific evaluation items). The internal consistency coefficients of all dimensions of the questionnaire exceeded the acceptable standard (>0.7), and the total questionnaire Cronbach's α coefficient reached 0.974, suggesting good reliability. The results of the second-round expert consultation showed that the item-level content validity index assessed by 44 review experts ranged from 0.84 to 1.00, all higher than the qualified standard (0.8), and the scale-level content validity index was 0.92, exceeding the recommended threshold (0.9).

Conclusion The AICU nursing quality sensitive indicator system constructed and validated in this study can effectively compensate for the lack of specialty adaptability of traditional general nursing quality evaluation tools. It is highly operable and can better guide clinical nursing quality control.