Adaptation of the consumer versions of the primary care assessment tools in Argentina with focus in mental health care

AUDISIO Y; MAMONDI V; ASE I; BELLA M; GRECO A; LUDUEÑA A; MÁNTARAS J; NÍCORA V; GONZÁLEZ B; STARFIELD B; BERRA S

Conferencia; 19th WONCA World Conference; 2010

WONCA

The Primary Care Assessment Tools (PCAT) is increasingly used to assess the attainment of primary care functions in several countries.Aims: To adapt the consumer-client (children and adults) PCAT, obtaining questionnaires semantically and conceptually equivalent to the original versions (USA), suitable to Argentina`s health system, and focusing on specific aspects of mental health care.Methods: A linguistically equivalence was achieved through two forward-translations and a content review was carried out by a multidisciplinary group of 10 PC`s local experts and the author of the theoretical model. They assessed the content validity in the context of the Argentinean health system. Working with the reviewed version, a bilingual professional with English as his mother language and totally blind to the original version, translated back the questionnaire into the original language. Then this back-translation was compared with the original version to identify semantic differences or not equivalent terms.Finally, the pretest was carried out using the pre-final PCAT Argentinean version with 14 subjects, involving convenience sampling to fill specific quotas of 2 persons each: questionnaire version (adult or child version, adults responding by themselves or informing about their children healthcare), health sub-system provider (private, public and social insurance), gender, age (young adults, elder people) and mental health state (with and without psychiatric diagnoses). The understanding of the version contents (clarity, acceptability, interest and familiarity) and the difficulties in interpreting the items were assessed. After answering the questionnaire, subjects were asked about specific aspects (hypothetically less comprehensible) through test methods derived from cognitive theory (probing and paraphrasing)