Cross-cultural adaptation and validation to Brazil of the Medication Counseling Behavior Guidelines

This work aimed to translate cross-culturally adapts, and validate the “Medication Counseling Behavior Guidelines” instrument into Brazilian Portuguese. The process of cross-cultural adaptation was carried out using international recommendations. The generated versions were evaluated for the semantic, idiomatic, cultural, and conceptual equivalences and the pre-test was carried out with undergraduate pharmacy students. The reliability of the instrument was evaluated through inter-observer reliability, test-retest, and internal consistency tests. The final version was submitted for content validation. The process of cross-cultural translation and validation result in the Brazilian-Portuguese version of the tool was done. During the translation and back-translation stages, only grammatical changes were made to establish cross-cultural equivalence between the versions under analysis. Regarding the semantic evaluation, six items (15.4%) revealed less than 80% agreement between the judges and were adjusted. Agreement greater than 80% was verified for all items assessed as cultural and conceptual equivalences. In the pre-test, four items (10.2%) were modified. Inter-observers and test-retest reliability demonstrated good to excellent reproducibility for most items (ICC = 0.60-0.98) and internal consistency was considered high (Cronbach's alpha = 0.99). Psychometric evaluation demonstrated and confirmed the validity of the Brazilian-Portuguese version of the tool to assess patient counseling practices. The tool can be used by pharmacists and undergraduate pharmacy students to improve the quality of patient counseling. Key words: Validation studies, health communication, counseling, simulation training.