Brazilian version of the Chelsea Critical Care Physical Assessment: translation, cross-cultural adaptation and evaluation of its clinimetric properties.

PURPOSE

To translate, cross-culturally adapt and evaluate the clinimetric properties of the Chelsea Critical Care Physical Assessment for the functional evaluation of patients admitted to intensive care units in Brazil.

METHODS

The steps involved in the translation and cross-cultural adaptation of the instrument included the following: initial translation, synthesis, back-translation, review by an expert committee and pretesting. Intra- and interrater reliability and agreement were analyzed with data generated from physical therapists' assessments of the same group of patients with the translated and adapted instrument (n = 30). The evaluations were performed by two physical therapists who independently and blindly obtained scores from the patients. Qualitative analysis was performed by the review committee with the expert-adapted and expert-synthesized translation of the Chelsea Critical Care Physical Assessment scale into Portuguese, and the content validity index was calculated.

RESULTS

Agreement was achieved between the translations of the Chelsea Critical Care Physical Assessment scale into Brazilian. Conceptual, idiomatic, semantic and experimental equivalences between the original and translated versions were obtained, resulting in the Brazilian version of the instrument, called the Avaliação Física em Cuidados Intensivos Chelsea, with a content validity index of 0.91. Evaluation of the clinimetric properties revealed evidence of high degrees of agreement and reliability, as all properties had an intraclass correlation coefficient above 0.75. The total intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.99.

CONCLUSION

A version of the Chelsea Critical Care Physical Assessment scale can be reliably used in Brazil for functional assessment following its translation and cross-cultural adaptation to Brazilian Portuguese and shows evidence of excellent interrater reliability.