Cross-cultural adaptation of the Richmond Agitation-Sedation Scale to Brazilian Portuguese for the evaluation of sedation in pediatric intensive care

OBJECTIVE: To perform a cross-cultural adaptation of the Richmond Agitation-Sedation Scale (RASS) to Brazilian Portuguese for the evaluation of sedation in pediatric intensive care. METHODS: Cross-cultural adaptation process including the conceptual, item, semantic and operational equivalence stages according to current recommendations. RESULTS: Pretests, divided into two stages, included 30 professionals from the pediatric intensive care unit of a university hospital, who administered the translated RASS to patients aged 29 days to 18 years. The pretests showed a content validity index above 0.90 for all items: 0.97 in the first stage of pretests and 0.99 in the second. CONCLUSION: The cross-cultural adaptation of RASS to Brazilian Portuguese resulted in a version with excellent comprehensibility and acceptability in a pediatric intensive care setting. Reliability and validity studies should be performed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Brazilian Portuguese version of the RASS.