Desenvolvimento e validação do conteúdo da escala de percepções de dificuldades com o tratamento antirretroviral

Abstract

Introduction: People living with HIV (PLHIV) should be properly informed when starting antiretroviral therapy (ART). It is important to identify the difficulties of PLHIV, in order to implement interventions to prevent a possible treatment failure. Objectives: To develop a scale to measure the perceived difficulty of PLHIV with ART and analyze its content validity. Methods: A scale containing 47 items was proposed from previous qualitative study. Between June and August 2015, it was applied to 27 PLHIV under treatment at Eduardo de Menezes Hospital to assess the comprehension of items by the target population (semantic analysis). The items were modified and evaluated by three judges regarding the relevance, appropriateness and dimensionality, using the validity of the content and kappa coefficients. Results: After semantic analysis the items were reduced to 40. No items were excluded after analysis of judges, since all were considered relevant. Only 30% of the items were modified after being considered unsuitable. The main difficulty of judges was to evaluate items on their appropriateness of the medication use between dimensions. Conclusions: Results indicated the suitability of the scale to the content that it intends to evaluate. The scale of the pilot version is being tested empirically and can be used in the health service at the individual level, identifying cases where it is necessary to provide education and counseling to the patient, as well as a research tool, at the collective level, to plan interventions and public policies.