Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 1, 2025

Oral Health Assessment by Lay Personnel for Older Adults
Published on: February 2, 2020
The Dutch version of the Oral Health Assessment Tool: Translation and inter-rater reliability among community nurses
Harm H J van Noort1,2, Anne Harderwijk3,4, Babette Everaars5,6
1Department of Surgery, Radboud University Medical Centre, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Objectives:
Translating the Oral Health Assessment Tool (OHAT) into Dutch and assessing the inter-rater reliability among community nurses.
Methods:
The original version of the OHAT was translated following the five stages of the 'Guidelines for the Process of Cross-Cultural Adaptation'. After a forward and backward translation, consensus on the pre-final version was obtained in an expert panel discussion. This version was pre-tested on its comprehensibility among 31 nurses and hereafter finalized. Then, inter-rater reliability of the OHAT-NL was determined by two trained nurses during oral assessments of 37 care-dependent community-dwelling older people. Intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and the Cohen's kappa statistic for individual items were estimated.
Results:
Feedback from nurses in the pre-test did lead to minor changes of the OHAT-NL. Inter-rater reliability was good (ICC 0.79; 95% CI 0.63-0.89) on the total score. Agreement on item level ranged from fair to very good, the kappa ranged from 0.36-0.89.
Conclusions:
OHAT is now available in Dutch having good inter-rater reliability among trained community nurses. Future research can further validate the OHAT-NL and develop intervention according to total OHAT-NL scores.
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