[Blood pressure measurement: the experience of personnel training and quality control in the Pro-Saúde Study].

The adequacy of medical management and the validity of epidemiological inference on arterial hypertension depend crucially on the accuracy of measurement procedures. This article reports on our experience with the procedures used for personnel training and quality control of blood pressure measurements in the Pro-Saude Study phase 2, which was conducted among 3,574 civil servants at a university in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2001. We utilized mercury sphygmomanometers and standard techniques according to international protocols. We monitored the technicians' adherence to adopted guidelines, final digit preference, differences between subsequent measurements, and proportion of missing data. Overall, these procedures helped minimize the potential for systematic errors related to the auscultatory method of blood pressure measurement, thus allowing valid analyses of factors associated with hypertension.