Cross-cultural adaptation and validation to Brazil of the scale of attitudes toward physician-pharmacists collaboration

Abstract

Background: Despite the increasing complexity of medication therapies and the expansion of pharmaceutical clinical services to optimize patient care working in collaboration with physicians. In this sense, interdisciplinary education has been encouraged. However, no instrument is available to measure attitudes toward collaborative relationships. Objective: To translate, cross-cultural adaptation and validation an instrument to measure collaboration attitudes toward students of medicine/pharmacy and physicians/pharmacists. Methods: The process of cross-cultural adaptation was carried out using international recommendations and was performed from January 2014 to April 2015. The instrument under consideration was translated and re-translated. A panel of experts compared the generated documents and the translation was evaluated for 20 undergraduate students of Pharmacy, 20 undergraduate students of Medicine and professionals (20 pharmacists and 20 physicians). Results: The process of cross-cultural translation and validation result in the Portuguese version. Modifications to the grammatical structures were made in order to establish a cross-cultural similarity between the English and Portuguese versions. Regarding the evaluation of the expert panel, six questions required modifications. Conclusions: Psychometric evaluation demonstrated and confirmed the validity of the Brazilian-Portuguese version to assess collaborative attitudes among pharmacists and physicians. Moreover, the scale can be used to evaluate undergraduates and postgraduates and foster the development of teaching methods that promote comprehensive attitudes in patient care.

Medical and Pharmacy Students’ Attitudes Towards Physician-Pharmacist Collaboration in Indonesia: A Case Study Approach

“…According to the existing tradition, physicians take total responsibility for patient outcomes and are still reluctant to involve other practitioners in the clinical decision-making process 17 . According to Cunha et al 3 and Vegesna et al 4 , the tendency to not seek to have collaborative relationships is also because physicians consider themselves in a higher power hierarchy among other intervention teams. Such circumstances have been confirmed in several multinational studies.…”

“…Therefore, collaborative processes and practices between physicians and pharmacists are essential to improve patient outcomes 1,2 . However, collaborative practice has not been fully implemented 3,4 .…”

Evaluation of students’ attitudes towards pharmacist–physician collaboration in Brazil

“…This new endeavor is also reflected in students’ behavior. Similarly, other studies showed a less collaborative attitude from physicians, which may infer that physicians have a common self-perception of being the dominant authority in patient care 26,30. In this sense, interventions are necessary to encourage medical students to work collaboratively.…”

“…The pharmacy and medical students were invited to complete the Portuguese version of the Scale of Attitudes Toward Pharmacist–Physician Collaboration (SATP 2 C) 26. This scale was originally developed by Hojat and Gonnella20 and was translated and validated to Brazil by Cunha et al26, showing adequate psychometric properties. This scale includes 16 Likert-type items on a 4-point scale (1=strongly disagree; 2=disagree; 3=agree; 4=strongly agree).…”

“…Some countries have investigated attitudes of medical and pharmacy students towards physician pharmacist collaboration12,25, however no study has measured it in Brazil. In this sense an instrument has been translated, adapted and validated by Cunha26 as the “Attitudes Scale on Medical-Pharmaceutical Collaboration” and can be used to compare the differences between groups in collaborative medical-pharmaceutical attitudes and research on the clinical outcomes of the collaboration between professionals. Therefore, this study aimed to measure undergraduate pharmacy and medical students’ collaborative attitudes regarding Pharmacist–Physician collaboration.…”