Objective To develop a literacy self-assessment scale for assessing public health emergency response in nurses. Methods Based on the knowledge-attitude and practice framework, the researchers reviewed the available literature on public health emergency response, and then defined the concept in nursing and developed statements for the questionnaire.Then expert consultation, pilot survey and formal survey were performed to select the items and test reliability and validity. Results Exploratory factor analysis determined 3 factors of knowledge, attitude and practice including 65 items, accounting for 68.870% of the total variance.Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the construct demonstrated a good fit to the model （χ2/df=4.008,RMSEA=0.086,CFI=0.860,TLI=0.853）.The Cronbach′s α coefficient of the scale was 0.988, the split-half reliability was 0.996, the test-retest reliability was 0.860, and the content validity index was 1.000. Conclusion The literacy self-assessment scale meets the psychometric requirements of dimensionality, validity and reliability, which can be used to assess public health emergency response in nurses.