Objective: to perform the translation and cultural adaptation of the document named Marco
Regional de Competencias Esenciales en Salud Pública para los Recursos Humanos en Salud de la Región de las Américas
IntroductionThe essential competencies in public health are defined by the knowledge, skills and attitudes for professional practice in public health care (1)(2) that are relevant for decision-making and resolution of population's health problems effectively and efficiently. this article, the adopted procedures varied because the translation and cultural adaptation were based on a PAHO document and not on a research instrument.Therefore, the pre-test application phase was not performed for psychometric evaluation and the phase of content evaluation by the expert committee closed the process.The process of translation and cross-cultural adaptation requires a method for achieving equivalence between the source language and the target language.For instruments and documents used by cultures other than that of the source language, the ideal is not only the language translation, but a cultural adaptation to maintain the instrument content validity in different cultures (7)(8) . This situation demands planning before starting the process (8) .This process of translation and adaptation was A web conference was held with this purpose, because a meeting face-to-face was difficult considering that translators were in different places from researchers.
A new version in Spanish and the definitive version inPortuguese (P3) were obtained as a result of this phase.The fifth phase comprised the cultural adaptation, content evaluation and analysis of cross-cultural