Translation and Cultural Adaptation of the Polish Version of the Communication Assessment Tool (CAT)

Abstract

Background and Objective

Adequate communication skills are the core competency of healthcare providers for optimal patient interaction and relationships based on mutual trust. Unfortunately, there are still few publications assessing the type and effectiveness of therapeutic communication, and there are no tools to facilitate the standard, regular evaluation of the process. The objective of this study was the translation and cultural adaptation of a Polish version of the 14-item Communication Assessment Tool (CAT) to assess the interpersonal and communication skills of physicians and to identify determinants influencing the quality of communication.

Design

It is an exploratory and cross-sectional survey design. The patients completed a survey consisted of the CAT. Socio-demographic data were obtained from the hospital register.

Setting

Hypertension clinic at the clinical hospital in Wrocław.

Participants

A total of 300 patients with diagnosed hypertension were selected. Of these, 50 patients were excluded (mental illness, cognitive impairment, resignation). A total of 250 people (61.23±14.34 years) participated in the study. Qualification for the study was carried out by a trained doctor, who is an internal medicine specialist.

Main Measure Outcome

Translation and cultural adaptation of Polish CAT.

Results

Cronbach’s alpha for the CAT is 0.96 and does not require the exclusion of any items to increase its value. The loadings of the individual items ranged from 0.725 to 0.894. At the item level, results ranged from 28.4% to 50.4% “excellent”, the highest scores were given to “let me talk without interruptions” (50.4%) and “talked in terms I could understand” (47.6%). The correlation analysis showed a modestly positive statistical effect of the duration of a medical visit (r=0.225) and the time spent on talking about patient’s problems (r=0.23) with the general result of the CAT questionnaire (p<0.001).

Conclusion

The CAT is a very good tool for assessing the quality of communication in Polish-speaking settings and can be recommended for use in everyday practice.

Keywords:

• assessment tool
• communication skills
• psychometric
• physician–patient communication

Data Sharing Statement

Data are available on reasonable request. The data are available by request from the corresponding author after appropriate ethics approval.

Ethical Approval

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. Written informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest for this work.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in the “Regional Initiative of Excellence” programme, grant number 016/RID/2018/19.