Morse fall scale: translation and transcultural adaptation for the portuguese language

Abstract

The study aimed to translate and adapt the Morse Fall Scale from English into the Portuguese language. This was performed in seven steps: authorization by the author of the scale; translation into Portuguese; evaluation and structuring of the translated scale; reverse translation into English; evaluation and validation of the scale by a committee of experts; evaluation of clarity of items and operational definitions with 45 professionals; evaluation of agreement between raters and the reliability of reproducibility, related to data from the evaluation of 90 patients, performed by four evaluators/judges. The clarity of the scale was considered very satisfactory, with a confidence interval of 73.0% to 100% in the option very clear. For the concordance of responses, the results showed Kappa coefficients of approximately 0.80 or higher. It was concluded that the adaptation of the scale was successful, indicating that its use is appropriate for the population of Brazilian patients.