Developing and piloting a communication assessment tool assessing patient perspectives on communication with pharmacists (CAT-Pharm).

Background: Effective communication strategies in health care help to enhance patient empowerment and improve clinical outcomes.

Objective: Adapt the original Communication Assessment (CAT) instrument for the pharmacist profession (CAT-Pharm) and to test its validity and reliability in two different settings.

Setting: Five hospital pharmacies in Italy and five community pharmacies in Malta.

Method: Pilot study involving a standardized multi-step process adhering to internationally accepted and recommended guidelines. Corrections and adjustments to the translation addressed linguistic factors and cultural components. CAT-Pharm, compared to the original CAT, maintained 10 out of the 14 items: one was slightly modified; three were changed to better fit the pharmacist role; one was added.

Main Outcome Measures: CAT-Pharm development and testing its practicality to assess patient perceptions of pharmacists' interpersonal and communication skills.

Results: CAT-Pharm was tested on 97 patients in the Italian setting and 150 patients in the Maltese setting to assess the practicality of the tool and its usefulness in investigating gaps and priorities for improving pharmacist-patient communication. Results Show reliability and internal validity of the CAT-Pharm tool. The analysis of patient perceptions of communication with the pharmacist in Italy indicated differences from that in Malta. The different settings provided insight into the utility of CAT-Pharm.

Conclusion: This study provided a valid and reliable tool that could be applied to assess patient perception of the pharmacist's communication abilities.