Cross-Cultural Adaptation of the Communication Assessment Tool for Use in a Simulated Clinical Setting

Developing and piloting a communication assessment tool assessing patient perspectives on communication with pharmacists (CAT-Pharm)

BACKGROUND

Effective communication strategies in health care help to enhance patient empowerment and improve clinical outcomes.

OBJECTIVE

Adapt the original Communication Assessment (CAT) instrument for the pharmacist profession (CAT-Pharm) and to test its validity and reliability in two different settings.

SETTING

Five hospital pharmacies in Italy and five community pharmacies in Malta.

METHOD

Pilot study involving a standardized multi-step process adhering to internationally accepted and recommended guidelines. Corrections and adjustments to the translation addressed linguistic factors and cultural components. CAT-Pharm, compared to the original CAT, maintained 10 out of the 14 items: one was slightly modified; three were changed to better fit the pharmacist role; one was added.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES

CAT-Pharm development and testing its practicality to assess patient perceptions of pharmacists' interpersonal and communication skills.

RESULTS

CAT-Pharm was tested on 97 patients in the Italian setting and 150 patients in the Maltese setting to assess the practicality of the tool and its usefulness in investigating gaps and priorities for improving pharmacist-patient communication. Results Show reliability and internal validity of the CAT-Pharm tool. The analysis of patient perceptions of communication with the pharmacist in Italy indicated differences from that in Malta. The different settings provided insight into the utility of CAT-Pharm.

CONCLUSION

This study provided a valid and reliable tool that could be applied to assess patient perception of the pharmacist's communication abilities.

Translation and cultural adaptation of a romanian version of the communication assessment tool (CAT_Ro)

BACKGROUND

The communication between health providers and patients influences the quality of medical care. The Communication Skills Assessment (CAT) is a reliable, validated tool, which was developed to assess interpersonal communication skills between physicians and patients. The purpose of this study was to obtain a Romanian version of the CAT (CAT_Ro), using a controlled and systematic process to translate and cross-culturally adapt the original questionnaire, since there are no validated instruments to assess healthcare professionals' communication capability in Romania.

METHODS

The study was conducted in two Departments of Internal Medicine and Rheumatology from Bucharest, Romania, using a rigorous scientific methodology for the translation process, according to literature recommendations, implicating conceptual evaluation, semantics, and cultural adaptation, which involved several steps. The updated version was pre-tested in a pilot study, which included 89 outpatients.

RESULTS

The results showed a narrow range of variability in item interpretation, without differences in patients' responses according to variables such as age, gender, education, disease type, number of previous visits with the same doctor.

CONCLUSION

CAT-Ro is the result of a comprehensive process study. It represents the first translation and cultural adaptation in Romanian of an instrument able to assess the health providers' communication skills, which was validated in a pilot study and is to be used in more extensive studies with patients from several specialties.