Spanish Translation of a Parent-Reported Hospital-to-Home Transition Experience Measure

A critical focus of pediatric hospital systems is to improve the quality of hospital-to-home transitions. Although validated patient-reported measures evaluating these improvement efforts exist for English-speaking families, a comprehensive measure to assess transition quality among families who speak a language other than English does not yet exist.

We used a team consensus translation approach to translate and culturally adapt the previously validated Pediatric Transition Experience Measure (P-TEM), a caregiver-reported hospital-to-home transition quality measure, from English to Spanish. We describe our rigorous translation approach, which involved a series of steps to preserve the original meaning of the P-TEM through careful team-based linguistic and cultural adaptation of the measure into Spanish. During this process, we also found additional opportunities to improve the understandability and content validity of the original English version of P-TEM. We then pilot tested the new Spanish P-TEM with 36 parents and administered the revised English P-TEM with 125 caregivers (ie, parents/legal guardians).

In pilot testing, none of the Spanish-speaking parents reported difficulty understanding questions, though 6% (2/36) expressed difficulty with understanding the response scale, prompting a change to present clearer scale anchors. Mean scores on the Spanish P-TEM were 95.4 (SD, 9.6) for the total score. Mean scores on the revised English P-TEM were 88.6 (SD, 15.6; total).

Using a team consensus translation approach is a comprehensive and collaborative approach that allows for translation of measures originally developed for English-speaking families to be translated in a way that is reliable, accurate, and culturally appropriate.