The Oncology/Hematology Telephone Triage Toolkit for Children and Young People: A Linguistic Validation

BackgroundThe transition from hospital to home care in pediatric hematology/oncology brings important benefits for families, but it can also generate anxiety regarding the management of symptoms at home. Although hospitals offer 24/7 telephone support, there is currently no standardized telephone triage tool in Italy for pediatric hematology/oncology, resulting in variability in inconsistent practices. This study aims to carry out the linguistic validation in Italian of the "Oncology/Hematology Telephone Triage Toolkit for Children and Young People V2 (2020)," a tool designed to standardize and improve the telephone triage process.MethodAfter obtaining approval from the tool's authors, the linguistic validation process was developed in 10 steps, according to international guidelines: After forward and backward translation, a preliminary version was created and evaluated through the Item and Scale Content Validity Indices to obtain an Italian version of the tool.ResultsThe working group of native-speaking professionals and a panel of nine experts from various Italian hematology and oncology institutions reviewed and approved the translation, achieving item content validity scores between 0.8 and 1 and scale content validity scores between 0.88 and 1. Some linguistic adjustments were made to adapt terms to the Italian context while maintaining the original meaning. The final Italian version preserved the original meaning and was deemed conceptually equivalent to the source tool.DiscussionA validated methodology in the translation and validation process successfully adapted the tool to the Italian context, maintaining its content and design. The final Italian version is now ready for usability testing.