“PCATool version to professionals in the primary care of the elderly”: adaptation, content analysis and first results

Abstract

Abstract The objective of this study was to adapt the instrument “Primary Care Assessment Tool (PCATool)-professional version” to measure the performance of the care provided by Primary Health Care (PHC) to the health of the elderly, from the perspective of professionals. The original instrument was critically analyzed by specialists with experience in Gerontology and PHC in relation to the health specificities of the elderly, with 64 syntactic-semantic adaptations and 28 inclusions of new parameters. The adapted instrument was applied to 105 health professionals from PHC in Campinas-SP and, compared to the original instrument, the adaptation proved to be able to distinguish the new parameters with statistically significant differences, and in the sample of the analyzed professionals the performance obtained was better avaliated in relation to “Accessibility” and “Comprehensiveness” attributes, and worse avaliated in the attributes “Longitudinality”, “Coordination”, “Essential and General Scores”. In the adapted instrument, it was verified adequate results in terms of content validity and reliability, good discriminative capacity in relation to the specificities of the elderly population, and potential to become a national instrument for evaluating PHC in care to the elderly.