Background:

Knowing the difficulties in the application of palliative care would allow us to propose improvement strategies. The objective was to determine the metric properties of the Palliative Care Difficulties Scale (PCDS) translated and adapted to Spanish.

Methods:

An instrumental validation study was designed in a regional hospital and primary care centers of a health district. 148 health professionals participated. Sociodemographic and professional variables were collected by a questionnaire about palliative care training and experience, as well as items from the PCDS. The statistical analysis was done with the SPSS 19.0 program.

Results:

It was verified the comprehension of the translation and back translation of the questionnaire, in a pilot study with 30 professionals. Subsequently, in the survey of 118 professionals, an endorsement frequency of not more than 51% was found for content validity. As for the construct validity, the calculation of the sample adequacy, using the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin index obtained a value of 0.76. The principal component factor analysis reached a total variance of 73.88% with all items. The correlation of factors ranged from 0.2 to 0.3; so the Varimax rotation was established. The correlation between the items of each factor was higher than 0.6. For the reliability analysis, the internal consistency obtained a Cronbach alpha value of 0.87. In the test-retest reliability analysis, Spearman’s Rho correlation for the scale was 0.81.

Conclusions:

It was obtained an instrument translated and culturally adapted to Spanish, with adequate validity and reliability to measure difficulties in palliative care.

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